The mathematical challenges of voting systems is one of the reasons I've come to support multi-member districts. When only a single person can represent a jurisdiction you're always going to have people disappointed in the choice and we have have plenty of proofs that perfect voting isn't possible, so we need to aim for best reasonable compromise.
Voting is even more about identifying who didn't win than who did win. In a multi-member district a much smaller slice of the electorate 'loses', making it much easier to build broad consensus around results.
Some of the sharper edges of many ranked choice or scoring voting systems are blunted by multi-member districts. They are not winner-take-all, so small changes in expressed preference that would have changed the winner in a single member district just re-orders the winners. Specific candidates could still find themselves losing when another system would have elected them, but the electorate as a whole still ends up with representation they can tolerate.
Multi member districts does circumvent one of the assumptions of Duverger's Law, which predicts a two-party system.
But you still need to work around collusions between candidates. Candidates will be pushed to run on a slate of N candidates for N seats, and promise to support each other. Voters who want any of their positions will avoid somebody who would interfere with their own top priority. The result acts the same as a two party system, where all N candidates support the same party.
You can get some benefit by combining it with List Voting, where you go ahead and reify the party system. The party gets to send whoever it wants, proportional to the votes.That makes it harder to run multiple candidates that take all of the spots. (Not impossible: they can break into multiple virtual parties. But that's risky and coordinating votes is difficult.)
Even at that I'm not sure it really helps. Lawmaking is still fundamentally a "single member" operation: a bill either passes or it doesn't. You still get pushed to be in either the majority or minority coalition.
No voting method meets every criterion but two of my favourites are
- Schulze Method [0]
- Ranked Pairs [1]
The Schulze method allows for a simple ranked choice ballot, and satisfies more criteria than other RCV methods. Downside is that it is hecking complicated so it can feel like an opaque process. With distrustful electors it's a no go imo.
The Ranked Pairs method satisfies a similar number of criteria as Schulze, and meets a weaker version of later-no-harm. It's also a very intuitive method. The main downside is that the ballots become impossibly long, scaling quadratically with the number of candidates.
It's weird to me how little score/approval voting has caught on (at least here in the US) amid the push to replace FPTP. It's a lot simpler to explain than RCV, and has a lot fewer downsides overall than both RCV and FPTP.
Being vulnerable to strategic voting is a huge downside that outweighs other considerations.
As the article mentions, in the real world score voting would just be approval voting where you put a max score on some choices and 0 on others.
And in approval voting you need to think about how others will vote and pick your cutoff point based on who you think has a chance - do you vote "yes" for the center-right party to avoid the hard right party getting in? Or do you vote "no" to help the center-left party beat the center-right party? (swap those directions to personal preference)
RCV isn't perfect, but in all but the smallest elections there's really no practical strategic voting considerations. You just state your true preference order.
The problem is the US is still running off best practice from 200 years ago and is famously hostile to change or copying another from other countries.
Any change is also going to disadvantage the two current parties so they will be hostile to it. Which with the hard-to-amend US constitution makes things very hard to change.
Some form of proportional representation or maybe STV in multi-member districts is actually what you'd do. Single member districts with fancy voting systems just gets you a token 3rd party representation.
Approval voting might be good but just at a human level, I think it can leave the voter feeling unsatisfied. If there is one candidate that I really like and another that I could only accept reluctantly as an alternative to someone worse then it feels bad that I need to "approve" of those two equally.
I think fundamentally it's because you have to convince the elected to pass laws that potentially undermine the way they got there, essentially asking them to kick out the ladder from underneath them. Couple that with the average person thinking that FPTP is the most fair because explaining why it isn't is counterintuitive, nothing is ever going to change.
We replaced the linkbait "you" in the title with a nicely first-person phrase from the end of the article. If there's a better* title, we can change it again.
* better = more accurate and neutral, preferably using representative language from the article
My vote is 'any 1 election runoff system'[score, star, approval, ranked choice, ...]. Every 1ER is better than first past the post. It would be nice if vote nerds would shut the frak up about this one is better than that on. Open primaries; top 4 or 5 go through to the general; general uses any 1ER. Were I writing a law to put this in place, I would say we should revisit which 1ER after X number of years or Y voting cycles.
I love the promise of ranked choice voting (and other schemes). Properly implemented it seems like it could be a magic bullet to balancing some of the political divide and drawing out candidates and ideas that would satisfy more than just the extremes...
But, oh boy: we have trouble with simple plurality voting. How would you explain the outcome to people if it was implemented broadly?
> However, they might decide to vote strategically to amplify their vote — giving Desert a score of 10 while giving everything else a score of 1 would effectively make their vote stronger.
It makes more sense for the voter to give their favorite candidate a 10, their least favorite a 0, and grade every other candidate on the spectrum between their two extreme picks. So that still seems to be as informative as you could hope for.
I think there's also a different and deeper question: what does the voting system do to the society it is running on. This is a very different kind of discussion than "does it map preferences well", but arguably more important.
Unanimous.ai has an interesting approach: instead of static snapshots, make voting a dynamic, real-time process where preferences are elicited through action.
12-year election officer here. This idea is great for small groups of informed voters.
However, I submit that there are (at least) three other crucial discussions to have:
- Does my status as an informed voter bias me toward a system for which I have done all the homework?
- Does my script that works fine in my dev system with relatively clean test data scale to an enterprise deployment and real-world loading?
- How significant in improvement is needful to pay for the switching costs? Twice as good? An order of magnitude?
Because I submit that, for all the virtues we informed types can see in RCV, it is prone to malicious attacks, e.g. flooding the ballot with a bunch of relatively unknown candidates.
Furthermore, if there is any sort of contention involved, the complexities are going to lead to (likely unfounded) claims of tinkering.
I'm a huge fan of the ditt-kuh-pow! (DTTCPOW, the Dumbest Thing That Could Possibly Work):
Everyone trading security for convenience is misguided, in my opinion. You want to mark a ballot and cast it in secret so that, whatever you have to say to appease the shrieking neighbor, you and your ballot are as physically secure as possible.
Staff the process so that pollbooks are <5k people. We get it done with ~20 people in my county for 13hrs on election day. ~240 precincts in the county. Not cheap, and yes, exhausting to staff. So, what? Staff, equip and support them and elections, can be a positive experience for all involved.
Even when you use the digital voting machines it spits out a paper ballot that you deposit into the ballot box so the country already agrees with you.
It's not security vs convenience it's security vs turnout. Our turnout is embarrassingly low, especially on non-presidential election years, we should be expending voting access to methods that have even less friction. If we can conduct banking via an app or website we can vote via an app or website too. We can start talking about reigning it in once we don't have a third of the country not voting.
You deal with the abusive spouse problem by letting an in-person vote override the mail-in ballot while everyone else gets an easy way to vote.
NZ switched from FPP to to MMP [0] after a few elections where a) the government was formed by a party that achieved <40% of the popular vote and b) parties that received 15 - 20% of the popular vote achieved only a tiny modicum of representation in Parliament.
I'm not sure MMP is the ultimate ideal, but I much prefer it to FPP. It's a very rare government that isn't a coalition government, and while we get the occasional tail wagging the dog moment, we also get a more diverse set of parties in power, and also more diverse representation.
Often what voters want to know before voting is who a party is willing to go into coalition with, there's usually no big surprises (e.g., the righter-wing ACT party and the centre-right (by NZ standards, they're still left of the Democrats at least when measured by public healthcare etc.) National always dance together, Labour and the Greens typically get along via a confidence and supply agreement even if the Greens are not formally in coalition) but then you have New Zealand First, who are openly mercenary about their choices, and the original Maori Party that went into coalition with National which doomed them in the next election.
FWIW, after living in an all-mail voting state (WA), I never want to go back to voting in person. It is amazing having a couple weeks to mark a ballot at my leisure, do as much research as I want, and then just drop it in a box (or mail it, I guess, but the drop boxes have definitely been more reliable for me).
But it's true I don't have a shrieking neighbor or brutal spouse to worry about.
Proportional + threshold is simpler and better in practice than most of these. Yes it's not a direct equivalent (you have to change the problem so it has a good solution).
Also the problem in some countries isn't the voting system alone, it's the unlimited donations by billionaires, unchecked gerrymandering and general institutional decay.
System doesn't matter when people get away with ignoring it.
I think the state of democracy in the "factory bamboozling" era is such that we need a system that reflects direct voter preferences less, not more.
The trick is coming up with a system that diverges towards the interest of the masses, rather than the elites or the corrupt or the foreign. Basically, the system must get the voters' preferences wrong, but get them wrong right.
This is really akin to the nature of representative democracy. Elected leaders manage the voters' interest rather than always doing what is polling better on that day. It's obviously a tricky task, but it's the hallmark of the best-functioning democracies.
Right now we're about as far from the goal as we've ever been. Our systems have been hacked and we don't have an effective counter.
What we need, IMO, is direct legislation. Many states have this and I think federally having the ability to put up and vote on a bill would do a lot to correct many of the issues we currently face.
Barring that, RCV would do wonders for the current political ecosystem.
theluketaylor|1 year ago
Voting is even more about identifying who didn't win than who did win. In a multi-member district a much smaller slice of the electorate 'loses', making it much easier to build broad consensus around results.
Some of the sharper edges of many ranked choice or scoring voting systems are blunted by multi-member districts. They are not winner-take-all, so small changes in expressed preference that would have changed the winner in a single member district just re-orders the winners. Specific candidates could still find themselves losing when another system would have elected them, but the electorate as a whole still ends up with representation they can tolerate.
jfengel|1 year ago
But you still need to work around collusions between candidates. Candidates will be pushed to run on a slate of N candidates for N seats, and promise to support each other. Voters who want any of their positions will avoid somebody who would interfere with their own top priority. The result acts the same as a two party system, where all N candidates support the same party.
You can get some benefit by combining it with List Voting, where you go ahead and reify the party system. The party gets to send whoever it wants, proportional to the votes.That makes it harder to run multiple candidates that take all of the spots. (Not impossible: they can break into multiple virtual parties. But that's risky and coordinating votes is difficult.)
Even at that I'm not sure it really helps. Lawmaking is still fundamentally a "single member" operation: a bill either passes or it doesn't. You still get pushed to be in either the majority or minority coalition.
jszymborski|1 year ago
- Schulze Method [0]
- Ranked Pairs [1]
The Schulze method allows for a simple ranked choice ballot, and satisfies more criteria than other RCV methods. Downside is that it is hecking complicated so it can feel like an opaque process. With distrustful electors it's a no go imo.
The Ranked Pairs method satisfies a similar number of criteria as Schulze, and meets a weaker version of later-no-harm. It's also a very intuitive method. The main downside is that the ballots become impossibly long, scaling quadratically with the number of candidates.
[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schulze_method
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ranked_pairs
nearting|1 year ago
yellowapple|1 year ago
ekimekim|1 year ago
As the article mentions, in the real world score voting would just be approval voting where you put a max score on some choices and 0 on others.
And in approval voting you need to think about how others will vote and pick your cutoff point based on who you think has a chance - do you vote "yes" for the center-right party to avoid the hard right party getting in? Or do you vote "no" to help the center-left party beat the center-right party? (swap those directions to personal preference)
RCV isn't perfect, but in all but the smallest elections there's really no practical strategic voting considerations. You just state your true preference order.
Of course, I'll take any of them over FPTP.
slyall|1 year ago
Any change is also going to disadvantage the two current parties so they will be hostile to it. Which with the hard-to-amend US constitution makes things very hard to change.
Some form of proportional representation or maybe STV in multi-member districts is actually what you'd do. Single member districts with fancy voting systems just gets you a token 3rd party representation.
ztetranz|1 year ago
bongodongobob|1 year ago
dang|1 year ago
* better = more accurate and neutral, preferably using representative language from the article
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
mdp2021|1 year ago
KenSF|1 year ago
grumpymuppet|1 year ago
But, oh boy: we have trouble with simple plurality voting. How would you explain the outcome to people if it was implemented broadly?
tromp|1 year ago
It makes more sense for the voter to give their favorite candidate a 10, their least favorite a 0, and grade every other candidate on the spectrum between their two extreme picks. So that still seems to be as informative as you could hope for.
hooverd|1 year ago
boxed|1 year ago
intalentive|1 year ago
smitty1e|1 year ago
However, I submit that there are (at least) three other crucial discussions to have:
- Does my status as an informed voter bias me toward a system for which I have done all the homework?
- Does my script that works fine in my dev system with relatively clean test data scale to an enterprise deployment and real-world loading?
- How significant in improvement is needful to pay for the switching costs? Twice as good? An order of magnitude?
Because I submit that, for all the virtues we informed types can see in RCV, it is prone to malicious attacks, e.g. flooding the ballot with a bunch of relatively unknown candidates.
Furthermore, if there is any sort of contention involved, the complexities are going to lead to (likely unfounded) claims of tinkering.
I'm a huge fan of the ditt-kuh-pow! (DTTCPOW, the Dumbest Thing That Could Possibly Work):
- Make Election Day a federal holiday
- Paper ballots
- In-person voting except in strictly controlled, marginal cases (e.g. deployed military).
Everyone trading security for convenience is misguided, in my opinion. You want to mark a ballot and cast it in secret so that, whatever you have to say to appease the shrieking neighbor, you and your ballot are as physically secure as possible.
Staff the process so that pollbooks are <5k people. We get it done with ~20 people in my county for 13hrs on election day. ~240 precincts in the county. Not cheap, and yes, exhausting to staff. So, what? Staff, equip and support them and elections, can be a positive experience for all involved.
Spivak|1 year ago
It's not security vs convenience it's security vs turnout. Our turnout is embarrassingly low, especially on non-presidential election years, we should be expending voting access to methods that have even less friction. If we can conduct banking via an app or website we can vote via an app or website too. We can start talking about reigning it in once we don't have a third of the country not voting.
You deal with the abusive spouse problem by letting an in-person vote override the mail-in ballot while everyone else gets an easy way to vote.
EdwardDiego|1 year ago
I'm not sure MMP is the ultimate ideal, but I much prefer it to FPP. It's a very rare government that isn't a coalition government, and while we get the occasional tail wagging the dog moment, we also get a more diverse set of parties in power, and also more diverse representation.
Often what voters want to know before voting is who a party is willing to go into coalition with, there's usually no big surprises (e.g., the righter-wing ACT party and the centre-right (by NZ standards, they're still left of the Democrats at least when measured by public healthcare etc.) National always dance together, Labour and the Greens typically get along via a confidence and supply agreement even if the Greens are not formally in coalition) but then you have New Zealand First, who are openly mercenary about their choices, and the original Maori Party that went into coalition with National which doomed them in the next election.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mixed-member_proportional_repr...
exmadscientist|1 year ago
But it's true I don't have a shrieking neighbor or brutal spouse to worry about.
throw0101d|1 year ago
This acronym needs to be more widely deployed.
ajuc|1 year ago
Also the problem in some countries isn't the voting system alone, it's the unlimited donations by billionaires, unchecked gerrymandering and general institutional decay.
System doesn't matter when people get away with ignoring it.
throwaway_1224|1 year ago
The trick is coming up with a system that diverges towards the interest of the masses, rather than the elites or the corrupt or the foreign. Basically, the system must get the voters' preferences wrong, but get them wrong right.
This is really akin to the nature of representative democracy. Elected leaders manage the voters' interest rather than always doing what is polling better on that day. It's obviously a tricky task, but it's the hallmark of the best-functioning democracies.
Right now we're about as far from the goal as we've ever been. Our systems have been hacked and we don't have an effective counter.
int_19h|1 year ago
cogman10|1 year ago
Barring that, RCV would do wonders for the current political ecosystem.