Maine Becomes First State to Use Ranked-Choice Voting in a Presidential Election

https://www.wsj.com/articles/maine-becomes-first-state-to-use-ranked-choice-voting-in-a-presidential-election-11604062812

by pondsider • 6 years ago

373 386 6 years ago

wsj.com

Taikonerd• 6 years ago

And in other ranked-choice voting news, two more states have ballot measures to institute it:

* Massachusetts: https://ballotpedia.org/Massachusetts_Question_2,_Ranked-Cho...

* Alaska (with open primaries): https://ballotpedia.org/Alaska_Ballot_Measure_2,_Top-Four_Ra...

ElijahLynn9• 6 years ago

Thanks for this, this is really _hopeful_!! I want to see Ranked Choice Voting (RCV) here in Oregon next!

philips2• 6 years ago

I recently learned that there is a group in Oregon advocating a slight twist on RCV called STAR[1]. There are efforts to get it used in Lane and Multnomah counties at the moment.

[1] https://www.starvoting.us/

woofie112• 6 years ago

The Massachusetts proposal is less dumb than Maine's. It's for all elections except presidential. RCV is incompatible with the NPVIC, as well as with how the electoral college works in the interim. If Maine voted for a third-party without NPVIC, it would, in effect, waste its vote.

Karunamon2• 6 years ago

As I understand it, the NPVIC will never happen. Its entire purpose, as expalained in a CGP Grey video, was creating a situation where no one state has to move first by making the agreement only take effect once a certain number of electoral votes are accounted for.

The problem is that this agreement is expressly unconstitutional by way of article 1 section 10: No State shall, without the Consent of Congress, [...] enter into any Agreement or Compact with another State

While states are allowed to divvy up their EVs within their own borders however they choose, this kind of interstate agreement to do so in a certain way is illegal, and bipartisan congressional support to circumvent the electoral college seems unlikely.

kibwen11• 6 years ago

NPVIC still assumes a two-party system, so it's fundamentally flawed.

Of course, if the whole country used RCV (or any other non-FPTP system) for federal legislative elections, then the presidential election would be far less important, since one party would be less likely to control the legislature and might actually deign to exercise some oversight, unlike our current Senate.

thehappypm• 6 years ago

I live in Massachusetts and had not heard a whole lot about this issue until I got the ballot. I read the proposal and I was a little confused why it's a better system, and it's a lot more complicated than "every person gets 1 vote and whoever gets the most votes wins". RCV feels similar to the Electoral College, a system made with good intentions but is so complicated that it's gameable.

smichel177• 6 years ago

Yeah. I have the same hesitations about it. I think the biggest risk is that it's only a small improvement, and people may feel like, "Tried alternative voting systems, they were more complicated and didn't really improve anything."

However, I ended up voting Yes on 2 because it will increase awareness that alternative voting systems exist. The more people who are aware that FPTP sucks moose juice, the more likely we can pass other, more impactful, reforms like STAR. So basically I'm wagering that there's more people like this, than people who will give up on voting reform due to RCV (really, IRV)'s shortcomings.

loughnane• 6 years ago

I’m in MA and our question 2 is whether to institute it, though it wouldn’t apply to presidential elections.

I think it’s a great idea. The only specific criticism I’ve seen is that it’s “more complicated” but to me that’s a price worth paying for the improved representation of the public will.

What’s surprised me is that I’ve heard several smart people tell me that they weren’t sure because they had heard that “it can cause unexpected results”, but hadn’t dug deep enough to elaborate.

Has anyone come across strong, detailed arguments against it?

pfisch• 6 years ago

Wouldn't it increase the odds of an extreme and/or single issue candidate winning?

I mean isn't the point of it that a 3rd party candidate would have a more viable shot at winning?

Though I suppose it would also better express the voters' will if those 3rd party candidates still lost.

DFHippie3• 6 years ago

If they win it's hard to say this will be a result the electorate finds disappointing. The advantage for mainstream candidates is that third parties won't be spoilers, which is currently a relatively common occurrence (and why Maine has ranked-choice voting).

Buttons8403• 6 years ago

RCV eliminates the spoiler effect, but I don't think that necessarily means that 3rd party candidates have a higher chance of winning. I don't know.

It is nice to be able to show your support for third party candidates in the way that matters most, by actually voting for them, even if they still have little chance of winning. It's nice to be able to do this without throwing your vote away. You no longer have to choose between strategic voting and showing support for your favorite candidate.

Even with RCV there will still be political parties with varying popularity, and there will still be 2 at the top that are most popular. At least we wont have to have candidates strategically drop out to avoid being a spoiler any more.

MikeTheGreat• 6 years ago

I think it actually increases the chances of a common 2nd choice winning.

Extreme candidates are only going to draw from their limited constituencies, but a choice that's "nice, but not my top choice, but I'd like them if my top choice doesn't get elected" candidate for a lot of people actually does really well in this sort of system.

ggggtez5• 6 years ago

It has the opposite effect that you described.

Consider the 2000 Gore v Bush v Nader. Bush won with a minority of votes. But if they used Ranked Choice, and Nader voters are generally assumed to have the preference order (Nader > Gore > Bush) then Gore would have won.

We can assume that politically, Nader is to the left of Gore, and Bush is to the right.

So in fact, ranked choice voting helps the candidate that is in the political center!

mbesto• 6 years ago

Wouldn't it increase the odds of an extreme and/or single issue candidate winning?

You act like this isn't happening already.

rthomas6• 6 years ago

If a candidate is everyone's second choice, I don't think you can call them extreme or single issue.

ianwalter• 6 years ago

I haven't but seems like a threat to the two-party system and those invested in it.

brixon• 6 years ago

This is the main reason why I like it. The current two parties have a choke hold on the government and a third (or fourth) party has no chance today.

jacques_chester17• 6 years ago

Multi-member electorates are far more likely to produce multi-party systems. Australia's lower house is single-member electorates and remains dominated by major parties. Its upper house is composed of multi-member electorates (one for each state) and consequently, that's where minor parties and independents most frequently show up.

ggggtez5• 6 years ago

No there are no real valid arguments against ranked choice voting. Ranked choice has the benefit that the there is no point in "gaming" your vote, so your optimal strategy and nash-equilibrium is to provide your real candidate preference order.

The key benefit of ranked choice is that voters will tell you what they actually want (even if their favorite candidate has no chance to win).

NickM7• 6 years ago

Ranked choice has the benefit that the there is no point in "gaming" your vote, so your optimal strategy and nash-equilibrium is to provide your real candidate preference order.

This is very demonstrably false, both theoretically and in the real world. Ranked choice voting only solves the spoiler effect in cases where the spoiler candidate has a small enough amount of support as to be rendered non-competitive, but if you have more than two candidates who are competitive then the spoiler effect comes back in full force. This is not just theoretical; it happened in the Burlington 2009 mayoral election, and fallout from that election led to ranked choice being repealed shortly afterward.

So, not only does ranked choice still incentive strategic voting sometimes, but it does it in a way that is harder to see and understand. There are other non-ranked voting systems like approval voting and score voting that are much simpler and better in this respect.

Ranked choice also has other drawbacks - like violating the monotonicity criterion - as well as more practical issues like making it impossible to distribute the counting process across precincts.

No there are no real valid arguments against ranked choice voting.

This is also quite incorrect. Our current system of first-past-the-post is bad, yeah, but there are plenty of valid arguments against ranked choice and - in my opinion - there are much better systems we could choose instead.

typest5• 6 years ago

This is completely false. Pretty much all voting systems are susceptible to tactical voting, e.g. gaming the vote. This was formally proven via the Gibbard–Satterthwaite theorem[1], which showed that the only way for a voting system to be ungameable was to either have a dictator (a certain special voter who always picks the winner), or to pre-constrain the output space to only two alternatives.

This critique certainly applies to Instant-Runoff Voting, the algorithm in question here. It is known that IRV often incentivizes voters to not rank their favorites first [2].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gibbard%E2%80%93Satterthwaite_... [2] https://electionscience.org/library/tactical-voting-basics/

jefftk2• 6 years ago

This is incorrect: people do better voting strategically even with ranked choice. To take an example, consider an election like:

32% of people: Clinton, Sanders, Trump

33% of people: Sanders, Trump, Clinton

35% of people: Trump, Clinton, Sanders

Now, this is a terrible election and there's no clear winner because people's preferences point around in a circle. Under traditional voting Trump wins, while under ranked choice Clinton is eliminated and Sanders wins. But if a few people preferring Trump > Clinton > Sanders had instead voted just Clinton > Trump > Sanders we could have had:

32% of people: Clinton, Sanders, Trump

33% of people: Sanders, Trump, Clinton

32% of people: Trump, Clinton, Sanders

3% of people: Clinton, Trump, Sanders

Then Trump would have been eliminated first, with only 32% of the first place votes, and his second place votes would have gone to Clinton, making her win. So by voting for a candidate they liked less, these voters got an outcome they liked more. Staying home and not voting would similarly have helped them.

6gvONxR4sf7o5• 6 years ago

As others are saying, there are certainly drawbacks to IRV. I think there are theoretical results showing that all of the mainstream proposals for voting systems are susceptible to strategic voting aka “gaming” your vote, among other issues.

What they aren’t acknowledging is that the situation is even worse with our current system.

My personal preference is approval voting, but I’m down with all sorts of systems that are better than the status quo. I expect that anything that lets you express more of your preferences will increase buy in and participation. Increased participation with preferences closer to people’s true preferences goes hand in hand with increased legitimacy.

We shouldn’t let perfect be the enemy of better.

ElijahLynn9• 6 years ago

I haven't fully absorbed this but Nicky Case built some visualization tools around this and other methods.

https://ncase.me/ballot/ (To Build a Better Ballot)

NickM7• 6 years ago

I came here to post that link. This is by far the best introduction to the topic that I've ever seen, and makes a complex issue with plenty of subtle, non-obvious consequences very accessible.

wyldfire3• 6 years ago

That's pretty interesting. Thanks for sharing.

IMO I'd probably settle for anything beyond FPTP but it's good to know that there's research behind the options.

coldpie• 6 years ago

We have it here in St Paul for city elections. It is definitely more complicated. It sounds easy in practice--just rank your candidates--but how you actually put that down on paper in a machine-readable way is a bit non-obvious. Here's an example of how it actually looks[1]. Now imagine that same thing, for every office on the ballot... It's not too bad if you know what you're doing, but it's easy to see how someone would do it wrong.

To be clear, I'm a huge fan of RCV and think it is massively unethical that we do not have it (or some similar system) for all elections. I consider elections that don't use RCV to be borderline invalid.

[1] https://www.minnpost.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/default/fi...

BurritoAlPastor• 6 years ago

The layout of that ballot isn’t helping. For comparison, I’ve found the RCV ballot in San Francisco pretty intuitive (https://sfelections.sfgov.org/sites/default/files/Images/Dem...)

1980phipsi4• 6 years ago

It would be nice if groups (including but not limited to political parties) could provide recommended ballots, in line with straight ticket voting, but in a ranked choice setting so for instance, the Democrat ballot might recommend the Democrat first and then the Green Party candidate second (or something like that).

paulgb3• 6 years ago

It can occasionally lead to weird results, the most often cited is the 2009 Burlington Mayor election[1] where more voters preferred Montroll to Kiss, but Kiss was the winner. The counter-argument to this is that plurality voting quite frequently leads to weird results (spoiler effects, etc.), and it seems relatively rare in RCV in practice.

[1] https://ranked.vote/report/us/vt/btv/2009/03/mayor

lhopki014• 6 years ago

where more voters preferred Montroll to Kiss That's only true in the first two rounds. In total more voters preferred Kiss over Montroll.

1980phipsi4• 6 years ago

Condorcet methods > RCV

ggggtez5• 6 years ago

When talking about argument against RCV, you'd need to come up with a way to create a "spoiler" effect.

While it's trivial to create a spoiler in the current system ( Bush v Gore v Nader ), trying to create a spoiler in RCV is much much harder. Go ahead and try. Then compare that to what would have happened in the current "one vote" system. You can easily see that RCV is clearly an improvement and makes it much harder to have 3rd party candidates spoil the election by stealing votes from the most popular candidate.

defertoreptar2• 6 years ago

Has anyone come across strong, detailed arguments against it?

There's a simpler way that's much easier for voters to understand: "approval voting." You mark all the candidates you approve of, and the candidate(s) with the most total votes wins.

jacques_chester17• 6 years ago

This basically devolves to FPTP.

Miner49er2• 6 years ago

This feels like voter disenfranchisement to me. For an example, I don't "approve" of any candidates in our current presidential election. I'm simply going to vote for what I think is best, strategically. If I had to say who I "approved of" (and took the words literally) I would vote no-one. I suppose I would end up still voting strategically and ignore the wording, but would all voters?

alasdair_• 6 years ago

Approval voting is simpler and has a similar end result.

exclipy• 6 years ago

Australian here. Firstly, ranked choice voting is so much better than first-past-the-post and you should do it.

But since you asked, Australia has seen one problem in recent years. But this is a problem specific to the conditions we have here. Firstly, some background:

1. In the Australian Senate, the single pool of voters from the state are deciding on 12 senators (EDIT: oops, should be 6). This is decided by running the ranked-choice algorithm until 12 remain (EDIT: 6).

2. In the Senate, there are now dozens of parties, so the ballot is hilariously wide.

3. Australia has compulsory preferencing. You MUST rank all parties on the ballot.

4. Because you can't expect the population to rank dozens of candidates at the polling booth, each party can decide for their voters what order to rank the other parties. So how do the parties decide how to rank the other parties? Backroom deals. Who knows what the terms of the deals are. In any case, it's not the voters who decide.

The result is that minor parties like the Sports Party and the Motoring Enthusiasts Party, who each get almost no direct votes, jostled their way up just high enough on the preference lists of enough major parties that they ended up snagging one of the seats.

More details here: https://www.fairvote.org/reforming-the-australian-senate

But as I said, this is made possible by the specific conditions of the electoral system here. It wouldn't be a problem if the election were for a single candidate, or if there were no party-defined preferences (necessitating non-mandatory ranking).

jacques_chester17• 6 years ago

A nitpick: in a normal election, half of the Senate faces election, so 6 per state.

It's only double-dissolution elections where all 12 face election at the same time. In those scenarios minor parties and independents are much more likely to get elected, because the quota is halved.

Voting above the line works basically fine. What happened is that the major parties were too lazy to discuss things with many minor parties, who then went off and arranged their own preference deals.

erentz• 6 years ago

The multi member district approach is preferable to single member districts because it gives a more proportional result. The Australian example demonstrates this in the extreme with very large multi member Senate districts electing different parties and single member House districts which end up electing the usual two parties only, maintaining the duopoly.

Arguably multi member districts of between 3-5 members would be a better sweet spot.

Removing the need to rank all members is also an easy solution. If someone doesn’t want their vote to transfer beyond their first or second (etc) preference why should they be forced to? Where STV is used in NZ for local elections you just rank those you want to rank. The Australian requirement to rank all probably stems from their compulsory voting requirement.

dragonwriter6• 6 years ago

The only specific criticism I’ve seen is that it’s “more complicated” but to me that’s a price worth paying for the improved representation of the public will.

The main problem with IRV (RCV is a horrible name for it, since its one of a large class of ranked-choice methods) is that, for the complexity of a ranked-choice method, it gives pretty much the least benefit of any single-winner system.

(The multimember district version of IRV, STV, is a fairly reasonable proportional system, on the other hand.)

googthrowaway42• 6 years ago

Can you put the same person for all of your choices?

Buttons8403• 6 years ago

I guess. There would be no benefit to doing so though.

Writing the same candidate for all choices is the same as only filling in the first choice and leaving the rest blank.

Vanit• 6 years ago

Unlikely. You usually rank by putting numbers in boxes against a printed list on the ballot.

mrguyorama4• 6 years ago

The Maine ballot specifically instructs you not to do that

heavyset_go• 6 years ago

The Maine ballot allows for it, though.

rtsil2• 6 years ago

No you can't, your ballot will be invalid.

The ballot shown in the article explicitly says "Fill in no more than one oval for each candidate".

24gttghh6• 6 years ago

This is false for Maine. It is a valid way to vote for a single candidate and not rank the rest. The ballot advises you not to do this, but it doesn't explicitly invalidate your ballot. See slide #6:

https://www.maine.gov/sos/cec/elec/upcoming/pdf/RCVMarkedBal...

You can vote for a single candidate across all your choices/rounds (across a single row), but voting for multiple candidates in the same choice will invalidate your ballot (down a single column). Multiples down a column would be like filling in all the circles for all candidates on a normal ballot, or even not filling any in. Same difference.

jacques_chester17• 6 years ago

If it's anything like the Australian approach, you indicate preferences by numbering boxes[0][1]. The ordering of names on the ballot is determined by drawing names at random.

[0] https://peo.gov.au/assets/images/image-library/have-your-say...

[1] https://cdn.newsapi.com.au/image/v1/e5ace64c596cd5aa508068ac...

D-Coder• 6 years ago

Can you put the same person for all of your choices?

No. That would invalidate your ballot. Unless you mean the degenerate case, where you only vote for one person.

rytill• 6 years ago

Awesome news! While we will never get to perfection (Arrow’s theorem), there must be some measure on which ranked choice voting can be quantitatively compared to single-choice vote.

For instance, if you took the sets of all candidate pools and voters with all permutations of preferences 0-1 for each candidate and prior beliefs that each candidate will be voted for by others, by how much average preference does ranked-choice voting improve the situation?

Is it ever worse for aggregate preference to use ranked choice voting?

benmccann• 6 years ago

There are numerous ways to compare voting systems. There's a good selection of comparison methods on this Wikipedia page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_electoral_system...

potiuper• 6 years ago

rank!=range; no, thanks.

ElijahLynn9• 6 years ago

Wow!!! This is really a huge step for an actual democracy!

tolbish• 6 years ago

Ask yourself why any politician or media outlet who claims to be pro-democracy would fail to promote this.

Way too many financial interests are involved in keeping the status quo. This is a wonderful start and a blueprint the rest of the country needs to follow.

jayrot• 6 years ago

Way too many financial interests are involved in keeping the status quo.

Indeed. With any major system (voting, healthcare, etc) if you find yourself saying "This system is completely broken", you need to understand that, no, the system is working exactly as intended.

mrguyorama4• 6 years ago

Fun story, the Maine Republican party has worked its ass off to try to get this shut down.

jimbob452• 6 years ago

I would prefer to see RCV implemented on smaller-scale elections first (state house/senate->fed house/senate->presidency). Don’t get me wrong, RCV is fundamentally sound and the future of voting but I don’t want the inevitable hiccups to be used as reasons for it not to be rolled out nationwide.

mwnivek2• 6 years ago

FYI, your plan to implement on smaller-scale elections first is exactly what's currently happening:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ranked-choice_voting_in_the_Un...

jimbob452• 6 years ago

You seem knowledgeable. Is there some sort of foundation or organization on RCV that I can back and parrot? I want to (gently) share the ideals of RCV with my social circle but it feels like me and a Wikipedia article against the world right now.

The zoo animals CGPGrey video is second-to-none in explaining the concept but is somewhat lacking in ethos.

strictnein2• 6 years ago

Not sure why your comment is getting buried. This is a very valid concern. If we're going to make a significant change to the way we vote it would be best to introduce it at the local levels first so people can learn the process and understand its impact.

timeimp• 6 years ago

We have this for all elections in Australia. It works great and allows you to vote for your single issue party but fallback to a more mainstream or centrist party without spending your ballot.

PaulDavisThe1st• 6 years ago

Not just single issue - you can vote the party or candidate that "far, far from the typical public position on most things but preferred by me", without opening the door to the ones you actively oppose.

I would likely be a green party voter by choice, but when there's a republican on the ballot, there's no way I'm voting green - the downside of having the republican win is (for me) larger than the downside of not casting my vote according to my conscience.Adjust to suit your own political preferences - perhaps you'd like to vote libertarian but are worried about allowing the crypto-DSA democrat into office, etc, etc.

This is MAJOR. The US, the UK and other first-past-the-post systems need RCV or something similar so badly.

[EDIT: yes, STAR is likely even better]

a13692099932• 6 years ago

Put another way, first-past-the-post means you're not voting for anyone; you're voting against whichever side of the ruling party is worse.

wyldfire3• 6 years ago

I think it would be excellent if it found more adoption in the US (or approval voting or similar).

What drawbacks/surprising consequences, if any, are there?

dicomdan• 6 years ago

It would hurt the current duopoly so you can expect a significant pushback against it.

If MA passes theirs it could pick up real mainstream momentum though.

graeme3• 6 years ago

In Canada it’s been used by the Conservative party for their leadership contests. Both times, the response to the winner has been “Who?”.

So in a field with a lot of contenders it can favour marginal candidates.

You also end up with an absurdly big ballot. Past, say, five ranks the choices are hardly meaningful.

I’m favourably disposed to this type of voting but those are a couple of downsides.

jandrese• 6 years ago

The drawback is that it is more complex than a traditional ballot. It's not especially difficult, but given how many people have difficulty with even our current ballots it will cause some additional issues.

MattGaiser• 6 years ago

It can have strange results when there isn’t a clear moderate.

Canada uses it for a lot of leadership elections. What often happens is that a candidate nobody knows or really wants wins because they got picked so their vote wouldn’t go to the main competing candidate.

So you get party leaders who nobody seriously examined as the more hardcore members just needed to park their votes.

typest5• 6 years ago

Most surprising consequence is probably that IRV is unlikely to break 2 party dominance, even though it this is an often claimed advantage of IRV.

The frequently imagined scenario with IRV is that, in a two party system where most people will rank 1 of 2 parties first, then a small percent of voters can safely rank a third party first. This party is then eliminated, but not before a surprisingly strong showing (e.g. 5% first rather than the .05% we currently have). This would likely happen.

The problem arises in the next election, when the third party is now strong enough to command a large percent of first place votes. Since the party with the least first place votes is eliminated (even if they have a ton of second place votes), the third party now stands a real risk of cannibalizing votes from the next most similar "mainstream" party. If this cannibalization were to occur, both parties could lose to the other mainstream party that many voters might not have preferred! Due to this risk, it's likely voters would strategically rank the third party below the mainstream party even if that wasn't their true preference. In this way, IRV can still lead to 2 party dominance.

aerovistae• 6 years ago

Serious question: given that you have this in Aus, why do the politicians always seem to be conservative clowns like Tony Abbott? I'm 29 but I can't remember any PMs of Aus ever being talked about internationally with anything but scorn so far.

With ranked choice universally adopted there I would have hoped for more diversity of representation :/

specialist• 6 years ago

(I don't know anything about Australia.)

Generally, election reform advocate for something like RCV for executive races and proportional representation (PR) for assemblies.

PR can moot districts, eliminating some attack vectors, like gerrymandering.

TOGoS• 6 years ago

Because the voting system is only one of many factors that determine what kind of government you end up with. Who controls the money in Australia? Who would they prefer to have in government representing them? Are there any ways they might use their money to propagandize or lobby for favorable laws?

(I don't know the Australian answer to that, but where I live the answer is "the ultra-rich and the investor class", "Republicans, but they like to keep Democrats in their pocket, too", and "yes, and it seems to get worse every year")

RCV would be a great improvement, but as long as money rules, things are gonna keep sucking.

axefrog• 6 years ago

We have a massive problem with our media being largely owned by Murdoch. The result is that our elections tend to be heavily influenced by lies and propaganda, just as is the case with Fox News in the US.

poulsbohemian4• 6 years ago

I totally get where this makes sense in your system, where the election typically results in a coalition of parties that come together to form a government, but I'm less clear on whether this makes sense in the US system where it is far more winner-take-all.

gorjusborg• 6 years ago

It makes sense in our system because it allows individuals to vote for the candidate they like the most rather than against the one they dislike the most.

Unfortunately, RCV only fixes that assuming that you have more than two candidates on the ballot.

This time there were 4 or 5 candidates for president in Maine, so I voted for the 4 I liked. Felt good, but honestly, the largely two-party system prevented many great candidates from being on the ticket.

godelski14• 6 years ago

The US forms coalitions too, and that's actually part of the problem. Both the democrats and republicans have subparties within them. It is really more accurate to think of democrats and republicans as coalitions. That's why we have people like Bernie being so different from Biden. Or Trump, tea party, and neo libs, being far from classical conservatives. All of which are republicans.

godelski14• 6 years ago

Australia's (as well as Ireland's) main advantage seems more due to proportionate representation (parliamentary system) rather than due to IRV. Australia is still dominated by two parties (>70%) and the minor parties have to be pretty close. This is the same problem that plurality has, that it causes parties to form large coalitions in an effort to compete with the other side.

chmod6004• 6 years ago

As a thought experiment, how would such a system change the current US presidential election?

I'm guessing that Trump would dominate the first round (a plurality would put him as a first choice), but I'm not sure what would happen once we factor in lower-rank choices of the majority would would probably vote against Trump (put him at the bottom or not at all).

EDIT: thinking some more, I'm guessing that Biden would have a ton of ballots in the #2 and #3 positions. Sanders and Warren would be prominent in the #1 position. And Bloomberg would be in a fallback position across many ballots (including Republican ballots). Not sure about Harris or Buttigieg.

amjaeger• 6 years ago

It's hard to tell. In the 2016 primaries Trump had 44% of the vote. That's a lot, and it's more than the other candidates, but its not a majority of the total vote. In the earlier primaries he most of his victories were in the 30's. So now you have to guess where he ranked for the 60-70% of people that voted for other people in early primaries. He might have still won, or other candidates could have emerged with majorities. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Results_of_the_2016_Republican...

[edit] I guess that doesn't really answer your question, because you asked about this election...

chmod6004• 6 years ago

Just the fact that he's an incumbent virtually guarantees that he'd get a lot of #1 slots. Unless there was a mass exodus of his base or a major Republican challenger, which I don't see.

antognini3• 6 years ago

It would likely have a larger impact on the primaries than the general election. Primary elections are full of strategizing about how to pick a set of issues that will resonate with a large enough fraction of the electorate to be competitive, but which don't have other candidates campaigning on similar issues.

Too many candidates running on a similar set of issues will split the vote and will lose against a less popular candidate running alone on a different set of issues. So they end up needing to consolidate (which can involve some wheeling and dealing like promising that the candidate who steps down will get a position in the remaining candidate's administration).

This is essentially what happened in the 2016 Republican primaries. The more moderate candidates never consolidated and so split the vote among themselves. By the time they had seen the writing on the wall and dropped out, Trump had built up a large enough margin that the only remaining candidate (Cruz) had no chance at catching up.

RCV will likely prevent a similar outcome in the future. But a further consequence is that candidates will have less incentive to drop out early in the primaries. So if RCV were instituted nationwide I would expect the primary season to be longer, messier, and much more crowded.

chmod6004• 6 years ago

"The more moderate candidates [than Trump] never consolidated..."

Thinking of Trump as a far-right candidate is, in my opinion, a misread. He's operating on a different axis. Many of his policies are center-left: no wars, peace deals, love letters to Kim Jong Un, the First Step Act, massive stimulus, and inner city programs.

His main positions on the right are conservative judges and the border wall. He kind of went crazy on those two things, and did a bunch of other non-partisan crazy things. But overall he doesn't fit into the left/right divide.

jacques_chester17• 6 years ago

The problem in primaries is that it's the fringe of the fringe who select candidates. The second problem is that it's not a primary election, it's a rolling circus. If primaries were RCV and happened on a single nationwide date, it's more likely that centrist candidates will emerge from the process.

strictnein2• 6 years ago

I think that people who favor ranked-choice voting have really underestimated how confusing it will be to a lot of people.

It may be "better", but like a lot of things that are "better" it also just feels strange. It feels like your vote, if for the leading candidate, only gets counted once, while voters for the losing candidates get more votes.

And yes, I understand that this is not the case, but adding additional confusion to our system when trust in it is at an all time low doesn't seem like a smart play. Gone will be the days when you can present a simple set of numbers to the general populace.

It's also been very strange to have a lot of out of state money dumped into my city of ~50k to get it added for our local city elections. I've gotten more ads and mailings about it than for our US Senate election, probably by a factor of 5x. It's clear one political party has made the determination that it will be beneficial to their side.

raldi• 6 years ago

We’ve been using it in my city for ages, and the “everybody will be confused” predictions never really manifested, especially after the first couple years of it.

Voters learn, and campaigns learn how to communicate clear instructions.

lotsofpulp• 6 years ago

If you don’t want to participate in the ranked choice system, or find it too confusing, just put one vote in like you normally would.

For everyone else, this is a chance to break free from the two party stranglehold.

jacques_chester17• 6 years ago

I think that people who favor ranked-choice voting have really underestimated how confusing it will be to a lot of people.

Tens of millions of Australians have voted this way for over a century now. The statistical likelihood that the population in Australia is somehow less prone to confusion is miniscule.

smichel177• 6 years ago

Score voting is not hard to understand.

- Give each candidate a score (0-5 points)

- Add up everyone's points

- The candidate who received the most points total, wins

It also happens to be a much larger improvement to the status quo than ranked choice (which is still an improvement).

JCharante• 6 years ago

This feels like a problem that can be solved by being taught about it though, and that's exactly what Maine has been doing!

For many years now a volunteer organization has been going to high schools and hosting classroom sized workshops to educate the students on ranked choice voting. When the news brings it up and their parents eventually comment on it, the students are there to clarify any confusing that their parents may have.

Ranked choice voting is also great for write-in candidates. You get the fun of voting for your dog without the guilt of throwing away a vote. Although I'm not sure if write-in votes require additional processing compared to people who just vote by filling in the bubbles.

justinclift• 6 years ago

https://archive.vn/KMUSx

antognini3• 6 years ago

I am curious how this will work with public campaign financing for third parties. Third parties who achieve 5% of the national vote are eligible for public campaign financing in the subsequent election. But would this be 5% of the first round votes? Or 5% of the final round votes?

Maine uses IRV, so the first round votes will probably make sense for the purposes of qualifying for public campaign financing. But if it were a Condorcet-style system you could have strange outcomes where a candidate wins the election, but has less than 5% of 1st place votes and therefore doesn't qualify for public campaign financing.

jacques_chester17• 6 years ago

In Australia it's based on the percentage of first preferences.

mrguyorama4• 6 years ago

Maine has produced some great material for explaining how this all works, with more than a few web pages for it.

Here is a large PDF of examples on how you would fill in a sample ballot: https://www.maine.gov/sos/cec/elec/upcoming/pdf/RCVMarkedBal...

jacques_chester17• 6 years ago

I have to admit that I dislike the Maine ballot design. I think the "number each box" approach is simpler and less error-prone.

treeform• 6 years ago

At first I did too, but then I thought about peoples handwriting and how it might be very hard to read the numbers. Then imagine a political fight over how many 1s are actually 7s?

24gttghh6• 6 years ago

It keeps the process consistent with filling out the rest of a ballot. Just fill in the little oval with your preference. It lets us use the same tabulation machines also, I presume.

mrguyorama4• 6 years ago

Maine has "verifiable" machine counting with hand counting as a backup IIUC. Add that to some of the in state standardized tests and bubbling your answer should be very familiar to people.

hacknat9• 6 years ago

I'm probably going to get massively down voted for this, but here it goes.

I became a citizen of the US in 2011, but I still don't understand why Americans think they can only have a viable 3rd party with ranked choice voting. The response I hear all the time is "We live in a winner take all system." Yeah, so does everyone else. All politics is zero-sum, including in every other country. Actually, parliamentary democracies are even more winner take all than in the US, because they (typically) replace much more of their bureaucracy than Americans do after their elections.

Other countries have viable 3rd parties and when no one has a majority you build a coalition. I really fail to see why Americans insist they can't have a viable 3rd party other than sheer historical prejudice, ignorance, and inertia. Perhaps the one difference is that 3rd parties would be spoilers in a Presidential race, but splitting your ticket is easy enough (and if it's not then this country is irretrievably ignorant).

My suspicion is that ranked choice voting isn't going to fix anything in the US, and all the CGP Grey fans will have to go back to the policy drawing board. I'll be the first one to be pleased if I'm wrong, but I doubt I will be.

The US's problems are 90% cultural and institutional.

Edit:

I want to be clear that I'm not against RCV, I just don't think its going to do anything.

jaredklewis3• 6 years ago

Yeah, so does everyone else.

But they don’t. For example, Norway, New Zealand, Germany, Sweden, and the Netherlands, none of which use the first past the post voting system (winner takes all) that most of the US does. As a result, those countries all have a healthy number of parties for voters to choose from.

hacknat9• 6 years ago

Ranked choice voting doesn't eliminate the winner-take-all, zero-sum nature of politics. That's entirely my point. All political power is zero-sum (the more I have the less you have), it doesn't matter what voting system you implement.

So my broader point is that, given that plenty of other countries don't have ranked voting of any kind and plenty of viable 3rd parties, Americans really have no valid policy argument to make as to why they don't have viable 3rd parties. The only arguments that hold any water are cultural.

vkou• 6 years ago

Parliamentary democracies are more winner take all when you only vote for one chamber (as in Canada), because that one chamber has more power than any one chamber in the US.

However, in parliamentary democracies, especially if they use proportionate representation of some form, coalitions are typical, which produces much better governance than perpetual two-party rule, where the two parties agree on ~70% of issues, and one of the two is absolutely insane on the other ~30%.

Hell, Canada uses FPTP, which results in some very weird election results, but even so, it has multiple parties - because coalitions are possible, and a minority party actually has some political power.

There's criticism that proportional representation results in fringe, whacky parties getting into parliament, but I am no longer swayed by that argument - because over the past ~twelve years, one of the two parties in the US has become a fringe, whacky party, and it routinely wins elections.

hacknat9• 6 years ago

There is no reason coalitions could not be possible in the US legislative branch. You could argue that they existed here in the 1950s and 1960s, to some extent, when the parties were so race-scrambled that there were liberal Republicans and conservative Democrats (i.e. there were effectively 4 parties in the US at the time).

DougWebb• 6 years ago

CGP Grey has excellent videos on this. Here's one that discusses the problems with the system the US uses now (in most states): https://youtu.be/s7tWHJfhiyo

hacknat9• 6 years ago

Plenty of other governments have first past the post voting and viable 3rd parties. The only argument where this holds water is with executive elections (president, governor).

jopsen2• 6 years ago

In scandinavian countries each party typically belongs to either the red block or blue block.

Some of them do flirt with the idea of switching sides. But it's typically always the red or the blue block that forms a coalition (or minority government with supporting parties from same block).

So you effectively have two sides. And parties are pressured by the media to declare which block they support before each election. And they rarely switch sides.

Which party within a block you vote on, does matter.. because it gives those parties more influence on the government.

But you could also say that what you vote for during the primaries on US elections does matter.. however, at each stage on use election a group that only makes up 30% of the population gets no representation.

hacknat9• 6 years ago

Still not a valid argument for why the US couldn't have a valid 3rd party. The same would be true here. No one who votes Green is going to vote for Libertarians or Constitutionalists.

huevosabio• 6 years ago

A lot of the other countries that do not have RCV also have one or more of the following features that help keep a healthy number of parties (not an exhaustive list at all): - parliamentary system - proportional representation [0] (e.g. party list systems, mixed member proportional representation [1]) - two-round voting [2] (like France)

RCV is not the only way, but it is _a_ way to foster viable 3rd parties.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proportional_representation#PR... [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mixed-member_proportional_repr... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mixed-member_proportional_repr...

hacknat9• 6 years ago

Yes, but there are still first-past-the-post governments with viable 3rd parties.

cmrdporcupine• 6 years ago

I actually think ranked choice voting would destroy our relatively successful third party here in Canada (the NDP).

Essentially when you survey voters you'd find that there's three voting blocs:

a) First choice Conservative, Second choice Liberal

b) First choice Liberal, Second choice NDP

c) First choice NDP, Second choice Liberal

Given this, ranked voting would probably just produce permanent majorities for the Liberals, and wipe out the NDP almost entirely. The Liberals are the first or second choice for most voters.

I'm not sure why 'progressive' voters here in Canada often seem to prefer this voting methodology when advocating reform. Experience in Australia should show them what happens, where both major parties are now pretty close to the right and left wing options are basically off the table.

I'm not the only person who thinks this. When the Liberal gov't tried to push ranked ballots through a few years ago analysts in the NDP clearly saw this as a threat, and did everything they could to stop it (along with the Conservatives), seeing it as a nakedly cynical attempt to ensure nearly permanent Liberal majorities.

I would far, far prefer a mixed-member-proportional system like in Germany.

And so, yeah, I agree I don't think in the US it would do anything. The same forces of conformity towards the right would still happen. Effectively the US already has a kind of ranking choice through its primary system. The two parties shift and "become" representative of whatever plurality can capture and win the primary.

scj• 6 years ago

I'd suggest that any new voting system in Canada would lead to very different results given time.

Parties that aren't in contention for a given riding will be replaced by parties that are (think evolutionary niches).

dragonwriter6• 6 years ago

I became a citizen of the US in 2011, but I still don't understand why Americans think they can only have a viable 3rd party with ranked choice voting.

You don't need IRV (sometimes, annoyingly, called Ranked Choice Voting), you just need any of a wide range of electoral systems that aren't the ones usually used in the US for federal and state legislative and executive elections.

The response I hear all the time is "We live in a winner take all system." Yeah, so does everyone else. All politics is zero-sum, including in every other country.

First, this is wrong on its face. Except in a structural duopoly, politics very often is not zero-sum, and, in any case, “winner take all” is not the same thing as zero sum, it's both zero sum and all or nothing. Even zero-sum political systems need not be all-or-nothing.

But, more important, you are entirely misunderstanding the meaning of the response. It's not about the overall system being “winner take all” (which, even in the US, it is not) or zero-sum (which is arguably a consequence of what is being discussed, but not the direct issue.) “Winner-take-all” is a term for either Plurality or Majority/runoff election systems, which structurally make (more strongly in the first case) the expected value of voting for a candidate other than the most favored of the top two negative, creating a structural incentive for at least local duopoly when used for legislative districts or regional executive seats, and for national duopoly when used for national office.

While the national duopoly is frequently commented on, it's actually historical weaker than local duopoly in the US. You can find cases where locally (even for a while at the state level, most notably the Minnesota Farmer-Labor Party before they merged with the Democrats) one of the two parties in the duopoly isn't a major national party, for instance.

Other countries have viable 3rd parties and when no one has a majority you build a coalition.

Name one country that does so with a strong, separately elected (not by the legislature) executive who is elected (directly or indirectly) by a method which doesn't involve ranked choices and uses single-member national legislative districts with majority/runoff or plurality elections.

The UK manages it with plurality legislative constituencies, largely because of regional differences (much like the US has sometimes had regionally differing duopoly, but with much more significance nationally because it's a parliamentary system so parties that aren't nationally top-two that get seats can still have a role in choosing and participating in the national executive other than by endorsing a major party candidate in advance and surrendering power to them.)

I really fail to see why Americans insist they can't have a viable 3rd party other than sheer historical prejudice, ignorance, and inertia.

Because some of us have actually studied comparative government and the structural incentives and effects of different electoral systems.

My suspicion is that ranked choice voting isn't going to fix anything in the US.

It probably won't; it's the alternative electoral system that does the absolute least to resolve the strucural impediments created by the systems currently in use (it's basically a small step less strong on those problems than majority/runoff), and unless it existed at both stages of the Presidential election (or that was reduced to a single-stage popular vote using RCV/IRV), it wouldn't address one of the biggest reinforcers of national duopoly.

The US's problems are 90% cultural and institutional.

The duopoly problem is 100% institutional and 0% cultural, in that it is entirely an effect of the legal and structural design of the institutions of government, especially the electoral systems in use, and not at all a separate product of culture.

hacknat9• 6 years ago

Yes, but why does the US have a structural duopoly. There may be certain features of the system that promote it, but I don't think it is close to provable that the US's system of government innately requires a duopoly. The duopoly exists for historic and cultural reasons.

Name one country that does so with a strong, separately elected (not by the legislature) executive who is elected (directly or indirectly) by a method which doesn't involve ranked choices and uses single-member national legislative districts with majority/runoff or plurality elections.

First of all the US has a two round system in most states (most states are open primaries). So France falls into this category.

Because some of us have actually studied comparative government and the structural incentives and effects of different electoral systems.

And some of us have actually lived under the electoral process and politics of other countries (in addition to studying them).

The duopoly problem is 100% institutional

No problem is 100% institutional. That is facile. Culture obviously plays a role in some regard (why is the opinion on whether "12 Years a Slave" should have won an Oscar a partisan thing?).

hooande2• 6 years ago

It doesn't make sense to compare the US to "other countries" that have different political systems. We don't have a parliamentary system. The executive doesn't necessarily represent the majority party in the legislature, which means that the office has a lot of political importance. It doesn't make sense to vote 3rd party when coalitions have such limited power.

This isn't about culture or arrogance. There are solid and well researched reasons that the US and similar political systems tend to be dominated by two parties. You can read more about this here:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duverger%27s_law

dragonwriter6• 6 years ago

It doesn't make sense to compare the US to "other countries" that have different political systems. We don't have a parliamentary system.

Sure it does, that's how you understand the effect of political systems.

What doesn't make sense is ignoring the differences in the electoral structures and pretending that because something works with a radically different electoral structure in one country, the reason it can't happen in the US must not be because of the US electoral system.

poulsbohemian4• 6 years ago

"We live in a winner take all system." Yeah, so does everyone else.

But they really don't compared to the US. If I vote Green in the US, in most locales (discounting Seattle and Portland here..) that person isn't going to get elected. If I vote Green in Germany (for example), there's a very real possibility that Greens will end up in a coalition government.

My suspicion is that ranked choice voting isn't going to fix anything in the US,

Agreed!

The US's problems are 90% cultural and institutional.

Yes. Money talks. If someone said "I'm forming a Progressive Party" or "I'm forming an Eisenhower Republicans Party", they would have enough philosophical supporters to make it happen, but they would need name-brand donors and name-brand candidates to have a meaningful impact. So far, that hasn't happened.

gusgordon• 6 years ago

The primary goal of RCV in the US is to address the hostile partisan divide. Making more parties viable is secondary.

When you have a ranked choice system (even if it's only in a fraction of states), it incentivizes the candidates to not disparage each other. If candidate A attacks B, it means the B supporters will rank A lower. RCV draws candidates closer together.

okennedy• 6 years ago

The key difference is that in (most) European electoral systems, voters vote for MPs, who then in turn vote among themselves to decide on a leader for the country. This creates a (limited) incentive for cooperation when no single party holds a majority, since a coalition government is required.

Simultaneously, voting for an MP has multiple impacts. Even if the MP isn't part of the coalition, they still have a say in how the government legislates, they can participate in debates, write bills, and take advantage of the resources of a government office to help their constituents.

Finally, voting for an MP is a local affair. The barrier to entry at this scale is high, but tractable. Alternative parties can offer credible competitions at the town or county level (e.g., the US congress has had at least some "independent" representation as far back as I can remember).

These three factors create a substantial difference in incentives in the US presidential election.

There are no shades of victory: Even if your elector votes for a 3rd party, there is no long-term benefit. After they cast their vote, they're done. This makes voting for a 3rd party extremely high risk: you're gambling that everyone else feels the same way you do. Even if you don't like either of the main two candidates, you're faced with what amounts to a prisoner's dilemma where the other 300 million players have repeatedly shown a policy of 'always betray'.

ip26• 6 years ago

I must be missing something, how does splitting your ticket counter the spoiler effect? (Which impacts all US elections, not just the Presidential race)

As far as I understand it, a strong & viable 3rd party is nearly impossible for the simple & single reason of the spoiler effect.

24gttghh6• 6 years ago

RCV is simple and you should support it or something like it if you are a proponent of Democracy:

Did a candidate get a majority (>50%)?

Yes: They win, the election is over.

No: The candidate who got the least 1st round votes has their supporters 2nd choice votes added on to their supporter's second choice candidate.

Does a candidate have a majority now?

Yes: They win, the election is over.

No: Repeat with those who had the least votes in subsequent 'rounds' until there is someone who has a majority.

alistairSH• 6 years ago

Why ranked choice over approval voting?

Approval voting appears to avoid the biggest pitfalls of FTPT, it's easy to explain (no run-off, etc) so fewer spoiled ballots (IRV results in more spoiled ballots by a large margin), and the physical ballot doesn't have to change (voter simply allowed to fill in the bubble for more than one option).

24gttghh6• 6 years ago

It's simply the one we had a referendum for lol.

I would guess that changing plurality to "most approved" would have brought up other constitutional questions too.

erdevs• 6 years ago

I see many comments here asserting that RCV is "fundamentally sound" and that there is proof that it satisfies at least strategyproofness (in the sense of Cooperative Game Theory and Social Choice Theory, s.t. revealing/voting for true preferences is at least weakly dominant).

But can anyone provide backup for these claims?

I'm far from an expert, but I'm curious to reconcile these claims vs Arrow's Theorem and Gibbard's Theorem. My (potentially flawed) understanding as well is that RCV leads to a greater propensity for "extreme" (in the strict sense of being the top choice of a small minority of voters) candidates to win.

nickff12• 6 years ago

RCV is basically just a very quick runoff election; it has the same propensity for extremeness that a runoff does.[1] That said, I think it is very likely that more people will vote for third-party candidates (TPC) under ranked-choice.

You could make the case that TPC will allow for the representation of a wider spectrum of views, or alternatively that TPC are likely to be extremists. Both may be true.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ranked_voting#Ranked_Choice_Vo...

RangerScience• 6 years ago

IMO it also lets you just count the interest, regardless of outcome. Now you could see Nader (or Bernie, or the libertarian candidate) get 5, 10% of 1st choices and know it's legit, even if it doesn't change the outcome of the election.

1980phipsi4• 6 years ago

Well it's similar to a traditional runoff when there are two major candidates, but it could lead to different results when support is split more evenly among three or more candidates.

kibwen11• 6 years ago

I would be sensitive to the "TPC under RCV are more likely to be extremists" argument were it not for the fact that FPTP has already allowed profound extremism in one of our two parties, and since FPTP is so anti-competitive it means that it's extremely difficult to combat. I'll take a system that makes parties more competitive, which non-FPTP systems all do.

1980phipsi4• 6 years ago

There are properties that different voting systems have. Not all voting systems can fulfill all of these properties. In many cases, it is a trade-off of some having some properties but not others and people deciding what they care about more. For instance, RCV satisfies the majority criterion, meaning that if a candidate receives more than 50% of the vote, then they are the winner. However, it does not satisfy the Condorcet criterion, which is that if there is a person who wins in a pairwise matchup against every other candidate, then that person is the winner.

RCV is also sensitive to different tactical strategies. You can rank a weak candidate higher in the hopes that they do well in one part of the run-off and then worse later. You may also have a preference for voting a less preferred candidate first for other reasons.

I wouldn't say it's perfect. It has some nice properties. Other systems may have nice properties too. The useful question to me is if you compare the current system vs. RCV, would it elect of those who more closely match the preferences of people they represent. I would say yes to that, but I also think Condorcet methods would do an even better job.

nickff12• 6 years ago

Have you seen any research on which parties or groups might benefit most from Condorcet methods? It would seem to me that it would benefit smaller parties who share something in common with a couple of major parties (such as the Libertarian party in the USA).

al132• 6 years ago

I can't speak for any theorems so take this with a grain of salt, but if the candidate who was the top choice of a small minority manages to win that would mean that they are someone that a majority would settle for, which I would think is a more optimal outcome than having a highly polarized winner who half love and half hate when the goal of an elected official should be to represent as many of their constituents as possible.

kibwen11• 6 years ago

The more typical definition of an extreme candidate is not "this person is not my top pick", but rather "I would not vote for this person at all". Candidates under RCV win when they get 50% of the vote, so if you're so extreme that only a small minority bothers to rank you then you're not going to find yourself elected on behalf of a minority. This is in contrast to FPTP, where any extremist can win with any miniscule percent of the vote if there's enough vote-splitting going on.

rrrrrrrrrrrryan6• 6 years ago

FPTP makes the mistake of assuming that the person with the most votes is the best.

Likewise, the biggest flaw of RCV (to me) is that it makes the opposite mistake: it assumes the person with the least votes in each round is the worst. This isn't necessarily the case.

It's still much better than our current system because it collects more data-points from voters about their preferences, and uses that data to make more comparisons between different batches of candidates.

But there are simpler systems out there with even greater voter satisfaction efficiency, because they don't make the same flawed assumptions about voter preferences. In approval voting, you either approve of a candidate or you don't, and you vote as such.

Election science wonks like to talk about theorems and satisfaction of obscure criteria, but I think they often undervalue the two things that matter most: voter satisfaction and simplicity. "Simplicity" meaning: an optimal strategy that's simple-to-explain, an easy to understand outcome, low cost of implementation, etc.

Most of us here are software folks, and we understand that designing a great system is the easy part; the hard parts are implementation and change management. Voting systems should be thought of the same way.

godelski14• 6 years ago

I'm glad you brought this up, because ~RCV~IRV does not actually satisfy these conditions (it is a personal point of frustration how Fair Vote is misleading, even by using the term RCV). IRV doesn't pass the favorite betrayal criteria. IRV also causes a weaker definition of what it means to be a spoiler[1]. Specifically you should look at monotonicity[2].

I'd encourage you to dig a bit into electionscience.org (they have some good YouTube videos as well) as they do a deeper dive on some of these topics. There's a reason Arrow himself was a fan or cardinal systems. The other part is that we need to consider factors other than VSE and spoilers. A lot of people get hyper focused on VSE (typically Condorcet supporters) and while it is an important factor 0.5% isn't a big deal (really a few percent isn't). Also you might want to check out our (HN) resident voting expert's[3] comments, because he links to a lot more information. I'd call myself a hobbyist where Clay is an expert.

[0] https://electowiki.org/wiki/Favorite_betrayal_criterion

[1] https://electionscience.org/library/the-spoiler-effect/

[2] https://electionscience.org/library/monotonicity/

[3] https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=ClayShentrup

jredwards• 6 years ago

A comparison of a few different voting systems that I found interesting: https://www.quiz2d.com/g2020/

6gvONxR4sf7o5• 6 years ago

Anything is better than the status quo. Instant Runoff Voting has legit flaws, but it would still be an improvement.

I always point folks at this https://ncase.me/ballot/

I sincerely believe that a better voting system is one of the highest ROI changes we could make towards better government, and some systems are just so simple it’s crazy not to do it.

I personally prefer approval voting, because it’s still trivial to mark, count, and explain (speaking by analogy, it's just switching from radio buttons to checkboxes). It also doesn't have as bad failure modes as some other systems (see the link above for comparisons). But everything’s better than today’s FPTP system.

NationalPark• 6 years ago

The problem is pretty much all systems that make voting more fair also make Republicans win much less, so there's very little bipartisan motivation to make changes.

kibwen11• 6 years ago

Maine voters passed it via ballot measure, no partisan politicking required. Likewise, the two states voting on it this year, Alaska and Massachusetts, are also doing so via ballot measure.

rrrrrrrrrrrryan6• 6 years ago

Well, because two-party systems are an emergent phenomena of First-Past-The-Post voting (Duverger's law), any move away from FPTP would favor third parties.

Almost immediately, the GOP and the DNC would start losing votes to the Libertarian party and the Green party, so they'll both rally against any change to the existing system.

Any major shift toward better voting systems will have to start in local elections where voters are fed up with both parties. Maine is doing an awesome job leading the way on the state-level.

driverdan3• 6 years ago

Both ruling parties oppose anything that opens the system to additional parties. Ballot access is a prime example. It's very hard for additional parties to get candidates on the ballot in most states.

Afton2• 6 years ago

In Canada, we say "electoral reform is always popular with the opposition party/parties".

kc-rush2049• 6 years ago

I would argue it would make Democrats win much less as well. We would probably end up with level headed moderates who are best aligned with the majority of the country's voters. Not a extremist that somehow scared and scammed 51% of voters.

None of the established powers-that-be will help change the system that keeps them in power.

wwweston• 6 years ago

Instant Runoff Voting has legit flaws

Talking to people about what they expect "ranked choice" means, I get the idea they mean Condorcet rather than IRV...

6gvONxR4sf7o5• 6 years ago

I'd love condorcet, and I'd prefer it to IRV, but I've only ever seen IRV when it comes to real proposals on ballots and implementations in governments.

I don't have access to TFA, but it's using IRV, right?

Zak4• 6 years ago

"Ranked choice" doesn't necessarily imply a particular counting method and could describe IRV or Condorcet. I'm disappointed that all of these proposals use IRV though.

Uehreka• 6 years ago

There is one thing that is worse than FPTP: The Top-Two Primary. A bunch of candidates run, if no one gets 50% then the top two vote-getters face off in a second round with no other options allowed. On the surface it sounds a bit like IRV, but it causes really bizarre outcomes.

Basically, let's say party A is unpopular, and has 2 candidates. Party B is extremely popular and has 7. Party A's candidates each get 15% of the vote, Party B's candidates each get 10%. Even though most voters voted for Party B, they're now stuck in a runoff with two candidates from the opposite party.

Some people argue that this forces parties to be disciplined and force out candidates they deem "unsensible" or "extreme". But in practice this often doesn't work, and even if it did I feel like the mark of a good voting system is that voters feel safe expressing their preferences without having to be strategic.

winstonewert3• 6 years ago

Do you have a specific example where this scenario played out?

lukeschlather• 6 years ago

I think this is easily addressed by using approval voting in the open primary. (And this has the benefit of being extremely simple while likely getting all the benefits of IRV/Condorcet.) Any sort of RCV ends up so convoluted I think a lot of people will try to be strategic but completely misunderstand some edge cases.

tehjoker• 6 years ago

Voting systems that serve to "moderate" voter preferences are anti-democratic. Sometimes an extreme policy is necessary to meet a challenge (e.g. climate change). A voting system should simply do its best to express true voter preferences. That's it.

clairity5• 6 years ago

that sounds like a problem with considering parties when voting, and trying to reduce the complexity of choice to a binary, rather than the merits of the candidates themselves.

zajio1am2• 6 years ago

There is one thing that is worse than FPTP: The Top-Two Primary. A bunch of candidates run, if no one gets 50% then the top two vote-getters face off in a second round with no other options allowed.

Well, that is just plain two round system, it is pretty common and definitely better than FPTP. The bizzare outcome you describe may also happen with FPTP, you just need one candidate from party A and several candidates from party B. The solution is same as in FPTP system - each party endorses just one candidate.

mcv2• 6 years ago

I don't see how this is worse than FPTP. In FPTP, the candidate with the most votes just wins, even if that is only 15%. A second round for the two most popular candidates is still better than that.

The issue in your example is of course that both parties send all their candidates to the election, instead of just their most popular one, and that dilutes the vote, but the same would happen if they did that in FPTP.

It's only in systems like approval voting or instant run-off that parties can afford to send all their candidates.

ElFitz• 6 years ago

That's what we have here in France, which led to a right vs far-right second round in 2002, from which the traditional left never really recovered.

hef198986• 6 years ago

Why would you have inner party run-offs in a public election anyway? Just have sort out their candidate far any given election internally beforehand. Then a Top-Two system is actually pretty nice, for direct mandates that is.

ponker• 6 years ago

Why would you expect approval voting to yield different results than FPTP?

6gvONxR4sf7o5• 6 years ago

I would frequently vote for more than just one candidate. And people who don't vote because e.g. Biden isn't progressive enough would have someone to vote for who could actually garner a significant number of votes. So maybe turnout improves too. Those other candidates/parties could then get momentum and funding and show up at the debates.

If you did it for just one election, I'd bet something like the president would get the same outcome, but local stuff with half a dozen decent candidates on the ballot would be different. Over time, different candidates winning lower races, plus 3rd party candidates for the big races being able to actually gather momentum would have profound impacts on the top races.

It would even change who shows up on the ballot. Remember in the dem primaries, all the commentary about candidate X drawing votes away from candidate Y, so they had to withdraw from the race to give their policies a better chance of winning? The whole "lanes" thing? Sanders and Warren wouldn't be splitting the progressive vote. And so on. Hell, the dems could nominate biden/harris and another pair in an effort to increase turnout, which would be suicide in FPTP. Or maybe not. I'd expect lots of changes and many would likely be surprising.

typest5• 6 years ago

You can think about it this way -- approval voting allows you to vote strategically for a candidate (in case you are worried about the lesser of two evils winning), and then allows you to also vote for anyone you actually prefer, guaranteeing this can't hurt the strategically chosen candidate.

This would allow third parties to see real support, and then go on to win subsequent elections.

godelski14• 6 years ago

Simple answer: The math says so https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-4FXLQoLDBA

Longer answer: cardinal systems (the generalized form that approval is part of) is able to capture more information about voter preference. It is easiest to see this with something like range voting. You may be familiar with a question like "Do you agree or disagree with x statement?: strongly disagree, disagree, neutral, agree, strongly agree." That is range. Approval would be "Do you agree or disagree with x statement?: Disagree, agree". Conversely FPTP would present you many statements and you have to pick the one you agree with the most, even though you may agree with many in the list. You can probably see here that you are actually able to capture a fair amount of preference information through this, thus allowing to elect representatives that more accurately represent the population as a whole.

ClayShentrup• 6 years ago

This exit poll result is one data point among hundreds.

http://scorevoting.net/Maine2014Exit

ElijahLynn9• 6 years ago

Would love to see Nicky Case incorporate the STAR system into a /ballot-2 version.

I learned about it recently from this article on the long and painful history of how STAR came to be > https://www.wired.com/story/dana-debeauvoir-texas-county-cle... (A Texas County Clerk’s Bold Crusade to Transform How We Vote).

Update: I just asked Nicky Case here > https://twitter.com/ElijahLynn/status/1322230931571159040

clairity5• 6 years ago

from the wired article:

"...the election technology business was a heavily consolidated industry—a cartel, essentially, of just three vendors, all owned by private equity firms—that was starved for profit and all but incapable of innovation. Subsequent research suggested that the companies earned their most stable revenue through a maze of fees: maintenance, upkeep, software licenses. Their core business model seemed to involve locking clients into relationships of “ongoing annual payments.” Small wonder, then, that the firms hadn't leapt to DeBeauvoir's idea of building a machine with open source code that aimed to liberate local governments with cheap, self-sustaining technology."

that's just one of the thousand cuts of corruption undermining our democratic republic. consolidation (including in government, via a 2-party system) has unquestionably proven to be a social bad.

in any case, the wired story was interesting and informative. the STAR system (potentially) solves the problem of verifiability with secrecy, but not the issue of better representing the people's will in voting.

for the record, i'm partial to score voting (like nicky case) with a 7-point scale.

cesarb2• 6 years ago

That page doesn't seem to mention the method used for president/governor/mayor elections here in Brazil: there will be an election for mayor (and the municipal legislative) on November 15. If none of the mayor candidates has at least 50% of the vote, there will be a second round on November 29 with only the two candidates which got the most votes in the first round.

This system has the advantage of being very simple to explain (I just did it above in one sentence) and implement, and works well enough in practice.

rbanffy• 6 years ago

Brazilian living in Ireland here. The system used in Brazil doesn't help with weeding out extremists (as it's painfully obvious right now). Ranked voting, OTOH, heavily punishes rejection, which results in reducing the size of the Overton Window in politics.

The two dominant parties here are both center-right and are barely distinguishable to the point the Green Party formed a government with them. This is undesirable if you want quick changes, but exceedingly good if the aim is long-term multi-generational stability.

dwater• 6 years ago

We have a similar system for electing the Mayor of Richmond, Virginia. It's biggest drawback is that the 2nd election is needlessly expensive, and since it's out-of-cycle and there are no other elections occurring at the same time turnout is much lower. I would prefer instant runoff.

bobthepanda4• 6 years ago

This can be really bad if the vote is split enough that the top two candidates are not the actual voters' preferred top two.

lukifer• 6 years ago

I second Approval Voting for similar reasons. In addition to the simplicity, IMO it sidesteps Arrow's Impossibility Theorem [0] by redefining the success condition: rather than trying to accurately capture political preferences, Approval inherently maximizes Consent of the Governed.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arrow%27s_impossibility_theore...

throw7• 6 years ago

Just reading from the website... I would like use the condorcet method and if it "crashes" just use first past the post.

godelski14• 6 years ago

Look into cardinal systems. If you want good voting systems you have to consider more factors than VSE. You'll find that cardinal systems can get to similar VSEs of condorcet with far less complexities and many other benefits.

godelski14• 6 years ago

My major concern about IRV is that there's a lot of false promises made with it. It is shown (and we have real world examples) that it doesn't do a great job at removing spoilers, which I think is most peoples' number one draw to the system. It also doesn't scale very well and becomes less transparent as it does so. That's why I personally reject the push for ordinal systems and push for cardinal. This may seem absurd, but we've had IRV in the US in the past and we reverted back to plurality. So there's historical precedence for this position as well.

nobodyandproud• 6 years ago

In general, do state rules apply to the primary (party) vote as well?

24gttghh6• 6 years ago

We can use RCV in primaries also, but not for State-level offices. There's pesky wording in the state constitution stating whoever wins a "plurality" is elected, while RCV requires a "majority". There is not this distinction for how Maine elects federal officials, hence it's use for those offices.

msk-lywenn• 6 years ago

It's good to see better voting systems being used. The one I'd like to see applied for something major is Majority Judgement: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Majority_judgment

waynesonfire• 6 years ago

can we get this for ballot measures as well?

Would be cool if one could select from multiple flavors of a measure. Sometimes the scope of a measure is large though it's in good spirit.

seniorsassycat• 6 years ago

How is Maine integrating it's ranked choice election into the federal election? Everyone voting for Maine's congressional election is using ranked choice, but only maine voters are using RCV to vote for president.

If they eliminate their states least popular candidates till one candidate has 50% then voters risk electing a federally unpopular candidate, in a winner take all election. In this case voters must vote strategically.

It seems Maine would have to wait for federal results and eliminate candidates that are not federally viable. How would this work with multiple states using rcv?

We need to abandon first past the pole (and the electoral college) but how can we do it peicemeal?

kibwen11• 6 years ago

I'd like to know this too (and I can't tell if it's in the article, because paywall). RCV (or any other system) at the state level is irrelevant, even dangerously counter-productive, since the electoral college is still FPTP in the end. You get just as much of a spoiler effect. I wonder if this is why MA's bill this year specifically excludes RCV use for the presidential election.

Technically I suppose a state elector from a state with RCV could decide to cast their vote as though RCV were in effect? But that seems unlikely and unreliable.

esrauch• 6 years ago

I disagree that it's counterproductive or irrelevant anyway. In the near term it's inconceivable that someone that isn't R or D will win Maine even with RCV, it will solely allows voters to additionally indicate support for a third party without spoiling their major party preference.

Basically I'd only expect it as enabling the the Libertarian or Green party to start challenging the majors after 20 years of iterated elections, which gives plenty of time to deal with the perceived issue of Maine voting Libertarian instead of Republican and a Dem winning by 1 electoral college vote (which seems an anyway implausible result).

poulsbohemian4• 6 years ago

As much as I want to see election reform, this seems like a horrific idea. It's hard enough to get people to vote, but now they have to know enough about candidates to rank them? Look, sure, for a lot of us dedicated voters / political junkies its no big thing, but for a lot of people that's way too much of a cognitive burden (I'm keeping it real here folks; it's hard enough to get them to use the privacy sleeve and sign their ballot...).

I'm also thinking in terms of what this does for incumbent vs challenger... would like to see what experts say, as it feels like votes could easily become spread across a group of challengers.

kibwen11• 6 years ago

This comment is uninformed. A nice property of RCV is that an individual can choose to entirely ignore it and vote as though it were still FPTP: all you need to do is fill in exactly one box for the candidate you want and ignore the rest. There's no mandate that you rank all the candidates.

poulsbohemian4• 6 years ago

Look, I love being downvoted and called uninformed as much as the next guy, but I think perhaps you are missing the nuance of my inquiry. I see at least four different voting proposals in the above comments, so it isn't clear to me whether RCV always works as you describe - admittedly, this discussion hasn't come to my locale in a meaningful way yet, so I'm legitimately interested in understanding the various models.

I have to wonder if perhaps even in the model you are describing still overlooks the human element. Our voting system is remarkably complicated - everything from fill-in-the-bubble to poke-out-the-hole to align-the-paper-ballot, voting by mail, voting in person, etc. The first part of my inquiry was a deliberate interest in the human interaction in this kind of voting.

The second part of my inquiry seems to have been touched upon by several other commenters, regarding the math behind outcomes when this kind of voting is introduced.

This comment is uninformed.

Perhaps leave this part out next time - the rest was helpful. You make more friends with kindness.

kylec• 6 years ago

"now they have to know enough about candidates to rank them"

If you don't know enough about the candidates to know which you prefer over others, why are you voting?

mpwoz• 6 years ago

This is great! Can't wait for the follow-up studies. If anyone's in Seattle, there's a group there trying to make Approval Voting happen for city elections: http://seattleapproves.org/

ethn2• 6 years ago

I think there's a sort of Toqueville effect[0] in regards to the popular treatment of FPTP.

According to Arrow's theorem more than two outcome voting systems, in terms of voting preference profiles (e.g. score or ranked choice), often succumbs to matching the least amount of voting preferences--which of course pleases that small disenfranchised minority but in exploit of the populous[1][2].

"Would it be wonderful if, under the pressure of all these difficulties, the Convention should have been forced into some deviations from that artificial structure and regular symmetry which an abstract view of the subject might lead an ingenious theorist to bestow on a constitution planned in his closet or in his imagination?" - James Madison

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tocqueville_effect

[1] Critique for layman: https://news.stanford.edu/news/2011/november/devlin-ranked-v...

[2] Mathematical Proof: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/arrows-theorem/#NonDic

Kye• 6 years ago

The current system in the US already favors a tiny minority. That's why they try so hard to limit who can vote. A change is an improvement if it at least grows the number of people represented.

ethn2• 6 years ago

Definitely not true by the empirical voting preferences, however, that's not a good argument to move away from it. If we're to believe Arrow, these other systems guarantee that fate we all don't want. At least the FPTP system has a chance.

There will never be a candidate which embodies every local sphere's preferences. In the Presidential system, the successful candidate is challenged to find and espouse the most common values across their nation to complement the majority of preferences. Thus, they'll commoditize that common ideology, rejecting more niche and sophisticated ideologies which otherwise alienates those individual local spheres with disparate and idiosyncratic preferences; that is to say, ideology is commoditized in a similar manner to a big brand soda as it projects from a niche market to a more massive consumer demographic

nojvek• 6 years ago

The thing that shocked me about US electoral college is that the votes themselves aren’t proportional.

Some states like Nebraska have vote per congressional district, but big states like Texas, California, Washington, Florida are all or nothing.

A republican in Washington has almost no impact on final outcome since its been blue for eons. Vice versa for democrat in Texas.

The way we count votes in US is not a true democracy. It’s a very weird counting game. In addition every state has its quirk of when and how they count votes (esp mail in votes).

We really need to evaluate our election process.

MikeAmelung• 6 years ago

It is the way it is on purpose. The President of the United States is not meant to have so much power that everyone is all up in arms about it all the time. If anything needs to be evaluated, it's executive orders and whatever has happened to Congress.

bobthepanda4• 6 years ago

Winner-takes-all for states in the EC was not the original implementation. In fact the Constitution doesn't make any recommendation on how states should allocate EC votes at all.

https://electoralvotemap.com/winner-take-all-electoral-colle...

bobthepanda4• 6 years ago

This was not historically true on its inception.

The problem is that states are allowed to determine how exactly they allocate their electoral college votes, and when one state became winner-takes-all EC it became more advantageous to campaign in their state to get many more electoral votes for the same amount of campaigning; which started a domino effect and now pretty much all states are winner-takes-all.

symplee• 6 years ago

For a detailed comparison of various voting systems, check out:

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

atotic• 6 years ago

When I saw that this will be the first RCV Senate election, I was so happy. It is a close race, with great potential for a 3rd party influencing the outcome. This is exactly where RCV is the right way to tally the votes.

Interesting bit is that RCV was implemented as a result of Maine ballot initiative in 2016, but it took years to actually implement it because of the lawsuits.

The politicians fought hard against it: the people's vote was repealed by Maine legislature right away. In 2017 voters had to vote on it again, and overruled the repeal.

Maine is viewed as a testbed: if RCV works there, it could be the model for the nation. It is on the ballot for congressional elections in Massachusetts right now.

kikoreis• 6 years ago

+1000. Let this become a worldwide trend!

Any system which takes more than 1 bit of input (I'm thinking of the top-two runoff system we have in Brazil, but hopefully the analogy is understandable) will generate a result with much higher fidelity. And, who knows, once we get there, we can try progressively shifting the focus of the election from candidates to their policies, which would help remove the most perverse incentives in the system.

ComputerGuru• 6 years ago

I feel like it’s my duty to evangelize or at least plug STAR in every one of these threads.

It is non-Condorcet, but don’t let that be the reason you dismiss it out of hand because there are very important shades of grey here.

Wikipedia: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/STAR_voting

Their own FAQ, though obviously biased: https://www.starvoting.us/faq

X6S1x6Okd1st• 6 years ago

Unfortunately RCV has some of it's best properties nullified when it comes to how the US does presidential elections.

Spoiler candidates are back in the running under this system.

E.g. everyone in maine has the following preference:

Jo Jorgenson

Joe Biden

Donald Trump

They have demonstrated that they'd prefer Jo Jorgenson over Biden, but Biden over trump. The reality is that the rest of the country can only show a preference for one candidate as first choice. Maine submitting a vote for Jo Jorgenson when she can not win the whole election really goes against the principals of RCV.

For now it'd be really good if they specified their delegates to vote in a way to best preserve the total ordering, not just to vote for whatever candidate 'wins' the RCV for maine alone.

mixmastamyk• 6 years ago

Meta: Recently on HN I've seen big discussions about voting systems. The commenters appear to be experts on the jargon and acronyms, which I've never heard before.

Does anyone know a good and concise introduction to the topic? Perhaps submit it for discussion as well?

Maine Becomes First State to Use Ranked-Choice Voting in a Presidential Election

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