A lot of nitpicking here, as is typical on HN, but the Australian experience is instructive. We can vote for the Greens without "throwing our left-of-centre" vote away and still preferring Labor to Liberal. Ranking only up to 5 is reasonable - if you want the simplicity of the old system, and don't want to research beyond 3 candidates, don't!
I can't see the weird complaining about having to learn more about candidates - there's usually only a few viable well-known candidates. You don't have to go research the Natural Law Party or Animal Justice or whoever.
The only cautionary tale is the whole horse-trading element of preferences does lead to some weird candidates making it in at the margins. We had someone who was semi-famous for engaging in a Kangaroo poo fight get in this way:
But this "preference whispering" is more of a big deal when preferences were allocated by parties - we had an option where you could vote a single '1' for a given party and it was their preferences that wound up being automatically applied (if you didn't go through hand-numbering all the preferences). So minor party deals became a huge deal. It's not going to be so big if you only have to number 5 and don't even have to keep numbering.
Great to see this on Hacker News! I'm a former YC Founder who's been working with NYC on voter education for this year's elections through RankedVote (https://www.rankedvote.co).
What would you say to someone like me who feels that IRV is perhaps the worst possible alternative voting system to advocate for? It feels like someone at some stage must be very dishonest, or otherwise dangerously uninformed, to think that IRV is worth advocating for over alternatives like approval voting, range voting, or any Condorcet voting system. I'm very worried that most places will have the political will to improve the voting system only once in a century and we'll have wasted it on a system that's unusually ill-behaved. I'm particularly concerned about IRV's non-monotonicity, whereby it's possible to hurt a candidate by ranking them higher, and likewise it's possible to help a candidate by ranking them lower. How can anyone feel they're voting honestly in an honest election when this is the case?
Why do you push IRV rather than simpler methods with higher VSE like Approval or STAR? Shouldn't we be highly advocating for a system that does not fail the favorite betrayer criterion? And I think Arizona is the perfect example why transparency and low complexity is essential (higher VSE is an added bonus given these).
Do you think there is a need to educate voters on how to tactically vote in ranked choice voting? Every voting system has strategies to use it effectively and most voters are not used to the tactics necessary for ranked choice voting.
We see a lot of education in how to use the ballot simply, but very little education on "advanced tactics".
In particular, a lot of NYC voters aren't ranking either Wiley or Adams, which is a huge mistake as those are very likely to be in the final round.
I think that it would be interesting to see this pizza example for comparing ranked voting against acceptance voting.
After all, in this example the plurality vote winner is still the clear, uncontested winner in ranked choice, so this example makes it look like ranked voting is just a way of complicating a process that "just works". I know this is not actually true, but this is how some people see alternative voting methods.
On the other hand, with acceptance voting you would probably get a different result as most meat eaters are indifferent towards mushrooms while many vegetarians would be passionately against pepperoni. So, I suspect that with acceptance voting the results could be switched, for better or for worse.
> You can get a sense for what it's like to vote in a ranked-choice election here:
That’s a neat visualization. The step where mushroom pulls ahead of sausage really shows the flow.
Though I do question the integrity of a pizza topping poll that manages to exclude pineapple-ham, not individually, but as a joint entry. Did it miss the filing deadline?
> And you can see Mayor Bill de Blasio eating a pepperoni pizza as a result of this here:
Worst mayor ever eating one of the worst pizza toppings ever.
This isn't very good reporting by NPR. The downsides they list are just straw men easily dismissed by RCV proponents, and they give an appearance of fair-and-balanced coverage while making opponents of RCV sound like Luddites. (It also seems like they got all their information from, say, chatting with people from FairVote and not by actually reading online discussions like this one here.)
RCV does have some serious problems. Eliminating the candidate with the least first-place votes at each round means a high probability of rejecting compromise candidates that may be a lot of voters' second choice. Also, placing your first-choice candidate first isn't always a safe choice. RCV is non-monotonic, which means it's possible that ranking someone first might actually cause them to lose. That's weird, and I think it's a good enough reason to investigate other options.
I think we should use approval voting in single-winner state and national elections. It's simple and it solves the problem of 3rd party candidates being spoilers (which is why most voting reform advocates dislike FPTP in the first place) without introducing any new problems. STAR is also a pretty good system.
Approval voting is currently used in Fargo ND and they recently adopted it in St. Louis as well.
There's a lot at stake when we change our election systems. I think one of the biggest risks is that we adopt RCV widely and then when people figure out that it's not actually all that great, they aren't going to want to try something different. They'll either say "democracy just doesn't work very well and there's nothing we can do about it", or they'll go back to FPTP because they were misled by a successful PR campaign that sounds like it has the backing of voting system experts. Voting systems should be changed rarely, and when it happens we should use the best available system, not chase the latest fad.
We've had this in Australia since day 1 of Federation.
One important factor the article didn't quite emphasise is how this voting system can break up the two party duopoly without creating 1920s-Reichstag-esque anarchy.
It's completely normal to put a third party as your first preference, while still indicating that you'd prefer Kodos to Kang.
In practical terms, it means the Dems would actually have to do some work in order to win the black vote, and likewise for the Republicans and working class white people.
Worth noting Australia is still generally a 2-party system in the lower house (1 representative each area) but less so in the senate (where each state elects the top 12 senators). Australians still look at envy at the New Zealand and German systems of Mixed Member Proportional representation (MMP)
Fellow Aussie and RCV-enthusiast here, but minor correction: RCV was introduced in 1918 in response to elections where a minority candidate won due to vote splitting.
It looks like the article got the Australian implementation somewhat wrong.
Under cons, it says that voters have to rank all candidates on the ballot paper.
In reality you have a choice. You can either rank all, or if you are lazier you can just select your favourite candidate and then your first choice candidate's preferences will be used instead.
Also for some larger ballots (usually the senate with nearly 100 options) there is now a requirement to only rank say the top 10 or so for the ballot to count, so you don't need to number all 100.
This is one of the best features of the Australian system. If you want to do the basic effort you can just tick one box, but if you care about the ordering you can also make your preferences count if you so choose.
As an outsider looking in to American politics, I feel changing to preferential voting is the best bang for buck change to move away from extreme politics. Hopefully this catches on elsewhere.
In Canada in 1952, the province of British Columbia switched to a ranked ballot and it nearly ended in disaster.
The ranked ballot was an attempt by the traditional Liberal and Conservative parties to keep a rising socialist party from gaining power, as they assumed no Liberal or Conservative voter would choose the socialists as their second choice.
But there was so much animosity between the parties that most voters chose a fringe right-wing party as their second choice, as a protest vote.
The two traditional parties were wiped out and the fringe right-wing party narrowly won, despite having no leader and little governing experience.
Fortunately, saner heads took over the fringe party and quickly steered it to the political center as a sort of big tent party for former Liberal and Conservative voters. But it could have gone very differently.
The ranked ballot idea was quickly dropped, but the event shaped British Columbia politics for the next 60+ years. That fringe party elected by accident became the province's natural governing party.
I suppose the moral of the story is that no voting system can prevent irrational voters from shooting themselves in the foot.
> We've had this in Australia since day 1 of Federation.
Australia adopted the preferential system in 1918.
> It's completely normal to put a third party as your first preference, while still indicating that you'd prefer Kodos to Kang.
The evidence shows most voters don't, which is why Australia's IRV elections still maintain a duopoly. In spite of the fact that the senate, which uses (proportional) STV, has escaped duopoly.
Ranked choice does avoid vote-split issues, but is insufficient for breaking a two party system because the races are still single-winner. That we still have primaries makes it worse.
Proportional representation is what is desperately needed to break the two party system.
It's worth mentioning that the way this has taken away seats from the two major parties is not mostly through the rise of third parties, but the election of independents unaffiliated with any party. This has invariably occurred in electorates which are so homogeneous they were safe for one or the other major party, usually (but not always) rural.
The most spectacular example of this was the election of three rural independents who then proceeded to install Julia Gillard from Labor as Prime Minister, even though they were conservative. Their stated reasons were Labor's promise to build a fibre-to-the-premises broadband network and their assessment of the conservative leader. Other examples include members in wealthy Sydney suburbs who, while otherwise conservative, wanted action on climate change, and members in farming electorates unhappy with the way the Nationals have been captured by mining and housing development interests and failed to represent farmers.
(The Nationals, formerly the Country Party, always join the conservative Liberals in coalition, apparently having forgotten the purpose of coalitions.)
An exception is the Greens, who usually score one seat based on the central business district of Melbourne. This includes very high density apartment towers, and student accommodation for the University of Melbourne, and is demographically odd.
Many observers believe the rural independents may eventually coalesce into a new party which displaces the Nationals. I see no evidence thay the Liberals' several humiliating losses to independents in "safe" seats is causing them to rethink their policies. This may or may not change once they are unable to rely on whatever replaces the Nationals to form government.
> One important factor the article didn't quite emphasise is how this voting system can break up the two party duopoly
I'm not convinced this is true. 2 parties control 80%. 2 coalitions control 95%. I'm also not sure how you can look at America and not recognize that our parties are more similar to coalitions (come on, AOC/Bernie are not the same party as Pelosi/Biden).
A better explanation is that Australia uses a parliament which has proportionate representation. My evidence of this is that other parliaments without IRV have similar party structures as Australia. So we have examples where you remove one aspect and things don't change, I don't think that makes for strong evidence that the thing removed is causing the effect (how can it cause an effect somewhere that it doesn't exist!).
So don't compare Australia vs America to prove IRV creates more parties. Compare Australia/France/UK vs America to prove parliament causes the desired outcome.
Here's my obligatory plug for approval voting. Approval is the "checkboxes instead of radio buttons" voting method. Select any, instead of select one. Vote for whoever you want and the candidate with the most votes wins. It gets rid of a lot of the drawbacks of FPTP while retaining its simplicity, unlike IRV.
I've always wanted to get people to vote on voting systems with a variety of voting methods and see what wins by what method. I'd vote this:
[ ] FPTP
[x] Approval
[x] IRV
Approval > IRV > FPTP
As an aside: It's a pet peeve when people call instant runoff voting (IRV) "ranked choice voting (RCV)." There are many kinds of RCV, and IRV is just one, and it has some pretty undesirable properties (a condorcet winner doesn't always win, so there can be a losing candidate that the majority prefers over the winner).
I don't like instant runoff. It seems like it systematically rejects compromise, and I think finding the proper compromise is an important goal of a voting system.
For instance, imagine a sectarian society split roughly equally between 3 religions, with 4 candidates running. The first three push theocracy favoring their respective religion, while the fourth favors tolerance and secular government.
If, statistically, most of the citizens favor their flavor of theocracy, are happy to put up with secular tolerance, and are vehemently (maybe violently) opposed to living under another religions theocracy, it seems that clearly the best choice is that fourth candidate.
If everyone votes their honest preferences, the first thing IRV does is throw away that fourth candidate.
The vote might not go that way if enough people recognize the situation and vote strategically, ranking what they see as the proper compromise artificially high. But that's true of any voting system and undermines major selling points of RCV.
That's true - but approaches that identify those best compromises get mathematically more and more complex as the system gains fidelity.
We shouldn't let the perfect be the enemy of the good. If a place wants to implement another voting system, I'd be interested to see how it plays out, and if the voters see the winner with legitimacy.
IRV is relatively simple and candidates in NY are still attacking it because of the complexity it has over FPTP.
But in practice that's extremely unlikely -- because there's always a significant proportion of the population that isn't tribalistic (or religious, in your case) the fourth candidate will tend to receive a decent proportion of first-place votes.
Alternatives have their own problems as well, where approval voting doesn't let you specify intensity of preference, or systems that let you granularly specify intensity of preference are not only too complicated for voters to understand, but also fairly arbitrary in how they compare intensities.
I really hate that Instant Runoff Voting, which is almost literally the worst possible voting method with ranked choice ballots, has somehow gotten the name “Ranked Choice Voting” stuck to it.
It’s like if “Democratic Elections” became a specific name for Plurality voting.
The really unfortunate thing about NYC's ranked choice voting is that you're limited to ranking only 5 candidates. This means you still need to engage in tactical voting.
You can't just rank the candidates you like, in the order you like them, because your genuine top 5 choices might not include the people who are most likely to win. You'll be "throwing your vote away" unless you include the most-likely-to-win candidates - that is, unless you vote tactically.
I've seen lots of discussion in NYC where people are trying to figure out the right tactical voting to do given their views and given the fact that they can only rank 5 candidates. Ranked choice voting is supposed to make tactical voting essentially irrelevant, so this is disappointing.
I don't disagree it's not ideal if you have more than 5 choices you like, but let's not over criticize a small flaw without appreciating the massive progress here. I read "horrible and unfortunate" and can see how people would take that to mean "back to FPTP".
I voted today and put 3 small candidates and two who "have a chance". I'm really excited to see how those 3 candidates shake out in the rounds, and that alone might give them a lot more power next race. That's super exciting to me and I think we can celebrate that and then push to improve the issues after :)
Even if they didn't limit it to 5, you still need to engage in tactical voting in IRV if you don't want to risk throwing your vote away. The spoiler effect is actually still there, it's just harder to understand. The problem is that your second choice only counts if your first choice is eliminated, so it's very possible that none of your rankings matter and have no influence on the outcome if you don't pick one of the top two candidates as your first choice.
How much time must people be putting into politics that they have such nuanced views that make it impossible to express a clear opinion on 4 top candidates and stick a major party candidate in spot 5? I guess New York politics must be vastly different from the West coast, because it's pretty uncommon to see a single race with more than 5 candidates in the first place, and truly unheard of for there to be 5 candidates that have any chance of winning in my experience. Having such strong opinions that this qualifies as "really unfortunate" sounds absolutely exhausting to me.
What's great about RCV (not IRV specifically) is that if the ballot data sets are retained, you can write software to recount them using other RCV algorithms. I'm curious when we'll next have a Condorcet Winner that isn't the IRV winner.
Would that be meaningful when the method is known to the voters ahead of time? It’s like the team with fewer total yards winning the Super Bowl... wouldn’t be that surprising since both teams know that it’s points that decide the game.
I don’t like rank choice voting because it can result in someone with fewer first place votes than the first or second candidate to win if the conditions are right.
We’ve seen surprise results where an obscure candidate has won when too many top choices split the first choice votes and someone relegated to the floor vacuums up all the throwaway votes (people think they have to “spend” all their votes)
I feel like approval voting gets overlooked too much in discussions of voting systems. It's so much simpler than instant runoff, and so much less prone to spoilers than first-past-the-post.
Yeah, I'm a big fan of approval voting, the amount of tactical voting is much less compared to most other voting systems (including Plurality and Ranked Choice). In particular a big flaw of Ranked Choice Voting is the center squeeze effect. This site has a good overview of it: https://electionscience.org/library/the-center-squeeze-effec...
The system allows ppl to vote a third party without „wasting“ their vote. It favors consensus candidates — that’s great when a single representative is needed (like a major).
For parliaments, however, the system favors the two main parties, since a candidate needs those 50% support. This means parliament, which _should_ reflect the pluralism of society, will not actually reflect that pluralism.
In effect, this ranked ballot business is a way to appear to engage in voting reform without actually wanting to change anything about the outdated 2-party system.
In Canada, the liberals promised election reform. Until it turned out that ranked ballot was not going to be recommended by the electoral reform commission. Since that was the system the Liberals wanted in order to improve their chances in future elections, and they had little interest in actually representative voting systems, they scuttled the process and reneged on their promise that this would be the last election using the first past the post system.
It frankly forced me to research more candidates than I would have. The amount of familiarity I have for every e.g. City Council candidate (which were RCV) versus DA candidate (who were standard voted) is night and day.
IIRC in some applications of ranked choice voting it's possible to rank an arbitrary number of choices. So even voting the old-fashioned way would be fine.
An Australian comic author has written an easy to understand comic about exactly this. Let Dennis the election koala explain it, with a worked example: https://www.chickennation.com/voting/
Without MMP it's not going to change who gets in. The 49.9% of people opposed to Kshama Sawant get no voice (yes, that's city of Seattle, but easier example for non-locals) in IRV(RCV) nor FPTP.
Tacoma did this a few years ago and nothing came of it.
I'm a bit skeptical of ranked choice voting- one of the key issues for the US that rarely gets discussed is that we can't use it to elect our President, due to the 12th Amendment, unless you're OK with the states selecting him/her instead. The 12th Amendment states that the Presidential winner has to have a majority of the Electoral College votes on the first round of voting- no multiple rounds- otherwise each state gets to cast one vote to pick who out of the top 3 candidates gets the job. (Yes it technically says 'the House' picks, but it's not the full House of Representatives- instead they give each state 1 vote).
I've presented this to various ranked choice voting enthusiasts, and have never heard a good response. Feel free to read the plain text of the 12th Amendment for yourself, it seems quite clear to me!
'The person having the greatest Number of votes for President, shall be the President, if such number be a majority of the whole number of Electors appointed; and if no person have such majority, then from the persons having the highest numbers not exceeding three on the list of those voted for as President, the House of Representatives shall choose immediately, by ballot, the President.'
If you want to get involved bringing RCV to vote in your state, all 50 states have an RCV movement. You can find and join your states movement here: https://www.rankthevote.us/states
The "slate" strategy (called "horse-trading" in this article) was strongly entrenched for that election. The idea is that if you and other people all support some "slate" that is a subset of the running candidates, then if you all rank those candidates in the same order on your ballot, it can boost every one of those candidates chances of being elected (this strategy is most effective in multi-seat races, such as this 9-seat city council race).
The reason this works is that if a candidate meets the quota of first-choice votes needed to earn a seat, they are elected. If more people chose them as first choice than the quota, some of the ballots will instead roll over and count for their second choice (etc etc).
Which ballots move on? This is largely influenced by the overall proportion of second-choice votes. So if everybody packed the two candidates in the same order, it maximizes the number of ballots for that candidate that will be used in the second-choice tally.
All voting systems have tradeoffs. The nice property of this one is that I was able to elect multiple city councilors who supported policies that mattered to me. Likewise, as long as 1/9th (plus one) of the city's population put a candidate as their #1 choice in that election, that candidate was guaranteed a seat. That sounds pretty fair to me!
If electoral systems interest you, I highly recommend William Poundstone's "Gaming the Vote: Why Elections Aren't Fair (and What We Can Do About It)". It focuses on the USA, so it's maybe better appreciated by American readers, but I found it highly entertaining and edifying, as I have several of the author's other works.
[+] [-] glangdale|4 years ago|reply
I can't see the weird complaining about having to learn more about candidates - there's usually only a few viable well-known candidates. You don't have to go research the Natural Law Party or Animal Justice or whoever.
The only cautionary tale is the whole horse-trading element of preferences does lead to some weird candidates making it in at the margins. We had someone who was semi-famous for engaging in a Kangaroo poo fight get in this way:
https://www.smh.com.au/politics/federal/it-was-people-play-w...
But this "preference whispering" is more of a big deal when preferences were allocated by parties - we had an option where you could vote a single '1' for a given party and it was their preferences that wound up being automatically applied (if you didn't go through hand-numbering all the preferences). So minor party deals became a huge deal. It's not going to be so big if you only have to number 5 and don't even have to keep numbering.
[+] [-] tadmilbourn|4 years ago|reply
You can get a sense for what it's like to vote in a ranked-choice election here: https://app.rankedvote.co/elections/7568/Best-NYC-Pizza-Topp...
And you can see the results visualized here (over 20K people voted in this one!): https://app.rankedvote.co/elections/7568/Best-NYC-Pizza-Topp...
And you can see Mayor Bill de Blasio eating a pepperoni pizza as a result of this here: https://twitter.com/therecount/status/1404809865235767315
[+] [-] xvedejas|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] godelski|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] lalaland1125|4 years ago|reply
Do you think there is a need to educate voters on how to tactically vote in ranked choice voting? Every voting system has strategies to use it effectively and most voters are not used to the tactics necessary for ranked choice voting.
We see a lot of education in how to use the ballot simply, but very little education on "advanced tactics".
In particular, a lot of NYC voters aren't ranking either Wiley or Adams, which is a huge mistake as those are very likely to be in the final round.
[+] [-] marc_abonce|4 years ago|reply
After all, in this example the plurality vote winner is still the clear, uncontested winner in ranked choice, so this example makes it look like ranked voting is just a way of complicating a process that "just works". I know this is not actually true, but this is how some people see alternative voting methods.
On the other hand, with acceptance voting you would probably get a different result as most meat eaters are indifferent towards mushrooms while many vegetarians would be passionately against pepperoni. So, I suspect that with acceptance voting the results could be switched, for better or for worse.
[+] [-] koolba|4 years ago|reply
That’s a neat visualization. The step where mushroom pulls ahead of sausage really shows the flow.
Though I do question the integrity of a pizza topping poll that manages to exclude pineapple-ham, not individually, but as a joint entry. Did it miss the filing deadline?
> And you can see Mayor Bill de Blasio eating a pepperoni pizza as a result of this here:
Worst mayor ever eating one of the worst pizza toppings ever.
(Seriously even Google dedicates multiple pages of results to De Blasio: https://www.google.com/search?q=worst+mayor+ever)
[+] [-] mtalantikite|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] elihu|4 years ago|reply
RCV does have some serious problems. Eliminating the candidate with the least first-place votes at each round means a high probability of rejecting compromise candidates that may be a lot of voters' second choice. Also, placing your first-choice candidate first isn't always a safe choice. RCV is non-monotonic, which means it's possible that ranking someone first might actually cause them to lose. That's weird, and I think it's a good enough reason to investigate other options.
I think we should use approval voting in single-winner state and national elections. It's simple and it solves the problem of 3rd party candidates being spoilers (which is why most voting reform advocates dislike FPTP in the first place) without introducing any new problems. STAR is also a pretty good system.
Approval voting is currently used in Fargo ND and they recently adopted it in St. Louis as well.
There's a lot at stake when we change our election systems. I think one of the biggest risks is that we adopt RCV widely and then when people figure out that it's not actually all that great, they aren't going to want to try something different. They'll either say "democracy just doesn't work very well and there's nothing we can do about it", or they'll go back to FPTP because they were misled by a successful PR campaign that sounds like it has the backing of voting system experts. Voting systems should be changed rarely, and when it happens we should use the best available system, not chase the latest fad.
[+] [-] AussieWog93|4 years ago|reply
One important factor the article didn't quite emphasise is how this voting system can break up the two party duopoly without creating 1920s-Reichstag-esque anarchy.
It's completely normal to put a third party as your first preference, while still indicating that you'd prefer Kodos to Kang.
In practical terms, it means the Dems would actually have to do some work in order to win the black vote, and likewise for the Republicans and working class white people.
[+] [-] twelvechairs|4 years ago|reply
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mixed-member_proportional_re...
[+] [-] ekimekim|4 years ago|reply
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electoral_system_of_Australia#...
[+] [-] lobe|4 years ago|reply
Under cons, it says that voters have to rank all candidates on the ballot paper.
In reality you have a choice. You can either rank all, or if you are lazier you can just select your favourite candidate and then your first choice candidate's preferences will be used instead.
Also for some larger ballots (usually the senate with nearly 100 options) there is now a requirement to only rank say the top 10 or so for the ballot to count, so you don't need to number all 100.
This is one of the best features of the Australian system. If you want to do the basic effort you can just tick one box, but if you care about the ordering you can also make your preferences count if you so choose.
As an outsider looking in to American politics, I feel changing to preferential voting is the best bang for buck change to move away from extreme politics. Hopefully this catches on elsewhere.
[+] [-] lr4444lr|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] thought_alarm|4 years ago|reply
In Canada in 1952, the province of British Columbia switched to a ranked ballot and it nearly ended in disaster.
The ranked ballot was an attempt by the traditional Liberal and Conservative parties to keep a rising socialist party from gaining power, as they assumed no Liberal or Conservative voter would choose the socialists as their second choice.
But there was so much animosity between the parties that most voters chose a fringe right-wing party as their second choice, as a protest vote.
The two traditional parties were wiped out and the fringe right-wing party narrowly won, despite having no leader and little governing experience.
Fortunately, saner heads took over the fringe party and quickly steered it to the political center as a sort of big tent party for former Liberal and Conservative voters. But it could have gone very differently.
The ranked ballot idea was quickly dropped, but the event shaped British Columbia politics for the next 60+ years. That fringe party elected by accident became the province's natural governing party.
I suppose the moral of the story is that no voting system can prevent irrational voters from shooting themselves in the foot.
[+] [-] ClayShentrup|4 years ago|reply
Australia adopted the preferential system in 1918.
> It's completely normal to put a third party as your first preference, while still indicating that you'd prefer Kodos to Kang.
The evidence shows most voters don't, which is why Australia's IRV elections still maintain a duopoly. In spite of the fact that the senate, which uses (proportional) STV, has escaped duopoly.
http://scorevoting.net/AustralianPol
[+] [-] Ericson2314|4 years ago|reply
Proportional representation is what is desperately needed to break the two party system.
[+] [-] SulphurCrested|4 years ago|reply
The most spectacular example of this was the election of three rural independents who then proceeded to install Julia Gillard from Labor as Prime Minister, even though they were conservative. Their stated reasons were Labor's promise to build a fibre-to-the-premises broadband network and their assessment of the conservative leader. Other examples include members in wealthy Sydney suburbs who, while otherwise conservative, wanted action on climate change, and members in farming electorates unhappy with the way the Nationals have been captured by mining and housing development interests and failed to represent farmers.
(The Nationals, formerly the Country Party, always join the conservative Liberals in coalition, apparently having forgotten the purpose of coalitions.)
An exception is the Greens, who usually score one seat based on the central business district of Melbourne. This includes very high density apartment towers, and student accommodation for the University of Melbourne, and is demographically odd.
Many observers believe the rural independents may eventually coalesce into a new party which displaces the Nationals. I see no evidence thay the Liberals' several humiliating losses to independents in "safe" seats is causing them to rethink their policies. This may or may not change once they are unable to rely on whatever replaces the Nationals to form government.
[+] [-] godelski|4 years ago|reply
I'm not convinced this is true. 2 parties control 80%. 2 coalitions control 95%. I'm also not sure how you can look at America and not recognize that our parties are more similar to coalitions (come on, AOC/Bernie are not the same party as Pelosi/Biden).
A better explanation is that Australia uses a parliament which has proportionate representation. My evidence of this is that other parliaments without IRV have similar party structures as Australia. So we have examples where you remove one aspect and things don't change, I don't think that makes for strong evidence that the thing removed is causing the effect (how can it cause an effect somewhere that it doesn't exist!).
So don't compare Australia vs America to prove IRV creates more parties. Compare Australia/France/UK vs America to prove parliament causes the desired outcome.
[+] [-] foobarbazetc|4 years ago|reply
-- an Australian/American living in the US.
[+] [-] 6gvONxR4sf7o|4 years ago|reply
I've always wanted to get people to vote on voting systems with a variety of voting methods and see what wins by what method. I'd vote this:
[ ] FPTP
[x] Approval
[x] IRV
Approval > IRV > FPTP
As an aside: It's a pet peeve when people call instant runoff voting (IRV) "ranked choice voting (RCV)." There are many kinds of RCV, and IRV is just one, and it has some pretty undesirable properties (a condorcet winner doesn't always win, so there can be a losing candidate that the majority prefers over the winner).
[+] [-] dllthomas|4 years ago|reply
For instance, imagine a sectarian society split roughly equally between 3 religions, with 4 candidates running. The first three push theocracy favoring their respective religion, while the fourth favors tolerance and secular government.
If, statistically, most of the citizens favor their flavor of theocracy, are happy to put up with secular tolerance, and are vehemently (maybe violently) opposed to living under another religions theocracy, it seems that clearly the best choice is that fourth candidate.
If everyone votes their honest preferences, the first thing IRV does is throw away that fourth candidate.
The vote might not go that way if enough people recognize the situation and vote strategically, ranking what they see as the proper compromise artificially high. But that's true of any voting system and undermines major selling points of RCV.
[+] [-] wslack|4 years ago|reply
We shouldn't let the perfect be the enemy of the good. If a place wants to implement another voting system, I'd be interested to see how it plays out, and if the voters see the winner with legitimacy.
IRV is relatively simple and candidates in NY are still attacking it because of the complexity it has over FPTP.
[+] [-] crazygringo|4 years ago|reply
But in practice that's extremely unlikely -- because there's always a significant proportion of the population that isn't tribalistic (or religious, in your case) the fourth candidate will tend to receive a decent proportion of first-place votes.
Alternatives have their own problems as well, where approval voting doesn't let you specify intensity of preference, or systems that let you granularly specify intensity of preference are not only too complicated for voters to understand, but also fairly arbitrary in how they compare intensities.
[+] [-] lotsofpulp|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dragonwriter|4 years ago|reply
It’s like if “Democratic Elections” became a specific name for Plurality voting.
[+] [-] catern|4 years ago|reply
You can't just rank the candidates you like, in the order you like them, because your genuine top 5 choices might not include the people who are most likely to win. You'll be "throwing your vote away" unless you include the most-likely-to-win candidates - that is, unless you vote tactically.
I've seen lots of discussion in NYC where people are trying to figure out the right tactical voting to do given their views and given the fact that they can only rank 5 candidates. Ranked choice voting is supposed to make tactical voting essentially irrelevant, so this is disappointing.
[+] [-] adjkant|4 years ago|reply
I voted today and put 3 small candidates and two who "have a chance". I'm really excited to see how those 3 candidates shake out in the rounds, and that alone might give them a lot more power next race. That's super exciting to me and I think we can celebrate that and then push to improve the issues after :)
[+] [-] NickM|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] 0xffff2|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tunesmith|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] spoonjim|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mc32|4 years ago|reply
We’ve seen surprise results where an obscure candidate has won when too many top choices split the first choice votes and someone relegated to the floor vacuums up all the throwaway votes (people think they have to “spend” all their votes)
[+] [-] rattray|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nine_k|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] delecti|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bostonvaulter2|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] yboris|4 years ago|reply
An amazing in-depth interview podcast from 80,000 Hours on the subject:
"Politics is so much worse because we use an atrocious 18th century voting system"
https://80000hours.org/podcast/episodes/aaron-hamlin-voting-...
[+] [-] ant6n|4 years ago|reply
For parliaments, however, the system favors the two main parties, since a candidate needs those 50% support. This means parliament, which _should_ reflect the pluralism of society, will not actually reflect that pluralism.
In effect, this ranked ballot business is a way to appear to engage in voting reform without actually wanting to change anything about the outdated 2-party system.
In Canada, the liberals promised election reform. Until it turned out that ranked ballot was not going to be recommended by the electoral reform commission. Since that was the system the Liberals wanted in order to improve their chances in future elections, and they had little interest in actually representative voting systems, they scuttled the process and reneged on their promise that this would be the last election using the first past the post system.
[+] [-] JumpCrisscross|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] thepete2|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tjscott|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] spicybright|4 years ago|reply
Really hope it catches on.
[+] [-] ortusdux|4 years ago|reply
https://www.king5.com/article/news/politics/king-county-to-c...
[+] [-] TulliusCicero|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] coryrc|4 years ago|reply
Tacoma did this a few years ago and nothing came of it.
[+] [-] hash872|4 years ago|reply
I've presented this to various ranked choice voting enthusiasts, and have never heard a good response. Feel free to read the plain text of the 12th Amendment for yourself, it seems quite clear to me!
'The person having the greatest Number of votes for President, shall be the President, if such number be a majority of the whole number of Electors appointed; and if no person have such majority, then from the persons having the highest numbers not exceeding three on the list of those voted for as President, the House of Representatives shall choose immediately, by ballot, the President.'
https://www.law.cornell.edu/constitution/amendmentxii
[+] [-] r3trohack3r|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jffry|4 years ago|reply
Here's a specimen ballot from that election (PDF): https://www.cambridgema.gov/election/~/media/483A54C6BC8546F...
The "slate" strategy (called "horse-trading" in this article) was strongly entrenched for that election. The idea is that if you and other people all support some "slate" that is a subset of the running candidates, then if you all rank those candidates in the same order on your ballot, it can boost every one of those candidates chances of being elected (this strategy is most effective in multi-seat races, such as this 9-seat city council race).
The reason this works is that if a candidate meets the quota of first-choice votes needed to earn a seat, they are elected. If more people chose them as first choice than the quota, some of the ballots will instead roll over and count for their second choice (etc etc).
Which ballots move on? This is largely influenced by the overall proportion of second-choice votes. So if everybody packed the two candidates in the same order, it maximizes the number of ballots for that candidate that will be used in the second-choice tally.
All voting systems have tradeoffs. The nice property of this one is that I was able to elect multiple city councilors who supported policies that mattered to me. Likewise, as long as 1/9th (plus one) of the city's population put a candidate as their #1 choice in that election, that candidate was guaranteed a seat. That sounds pretty fair to me!
[+] [-] alamortsubite|4 years ago|reply