Why I prefer ranked-choice voting to approval voting
I recently wrote a blog post explaining why I prefer ranked-choice voting
(i.e., IRV or alternative vote) to approval voting. It is a quite
different kind of argument than most of the posts here because it is a
policy argument rather than a mathematical one. Nevertheless, I thought
people here might find it interesting. I'd love to hear your comments and
any counterarguments as well.
I've copied the post below and you can also find it here:
http://blog.opavote.com/2016/10/why-i-prefer-ranked-
choice-voting-to.html
Why I prefer ranked-choice voting to approval voting
https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-zufbCki-BVo/V_o1-OKl27I/AAAAAAAAASM/vrix1OAitpsQ4MhGoPunWk38sNcWu-qPwCLcB/s1600/rcv%2Bballot.png
Voting is not an easy task for a voter. I don't mean taking time off work,
getting to the polls, and waiting in line, etc. I mean, when you are
standing there in the ballot box, you have to decide what vote you want to
cast given the options presented to you. For example, a Jill Stein
supporter may be torn between supporting her favorite candidate and voting
for a candidate who has a better chance of winning the election. I'll
refer to this as the cognitive burden of expressing your vote.
In this post, I'll address the cognitive burden of three different types of
voting:
- Plurality voting (i.e., selecting one candidate)
- Approval Voting
- Ranked-choice voting
OpaVote http://www.opavote.com/ supports all three of these voting
methods if you want to try them out yourself.
Plurality Voting
Plurality voting is very simple, a voter simply picks one candidate. There
is, however, a cognitive burden when there are more than two candidates. A
voter presumably wants her vote to matter. Accordingly, a voter should not
necessarily select her favorite candidate, but instead select her favorite
candidate who has a reasonable chance of being elected.
Consider the current U.S. Presidential election. I'm a big supporter of
the Green Party, but Jill Stein is not going to win the election. I'd like
to vote for the Green Party, but instead I'll vote for Hillary because that
is the best way for my vote to make a difference. Others will vote for the
Green Party out of principle.
Where there are more viable candidates, the cognitive burden is much
higher. The French 2012 elections for President had ten candidates in the
first round. A voter thus needed to consider which candidates had a chance
of winning, and then select her favorite among those who had a chance of
winning.
Approval Voting
With approval voting, a voter has the option to approve as many candidates
as they like. The candidate with the most approvals is the winner. For
someone whose first choice is Jill, the voter may, for example, approve of
Jill and Hillary and not approve Donald and Gary.
Approval voting, like plurality voting, is very simple in practice. A
voter just selects one or more candidates. But Approval voting suffers
from similar cognitive burdens as plurality voting. How do you draw the
line between candidates you approve and candidates you don't approve?
Consider a voter whose true preferences are:
- Jill Stein
- Hillary Clinton
- Gary Johnson
- Donald Trump
Clearly, this voter will approve Jill and will not approve Donald, but what
should she do with the other two candidates? Should she also approve
Hillary? Giving Hillary an approval may help Hillary beat Jill, but she
would certainly prefer Hillary to Gary or Donald. Similarly, this voter
may not like Gary, but she may dislike Donald so much that it is worthwhile
to approve Gary to minimize the chance that Donald is elected.
Phew... that is a lot of thinking to do. It would be even harder if Jill
and Gary had better chances of being elected.
In sum, approving any candidates other than your favorite can hurt your
favorite. Not approving candidates can help your least favorite get
elected. Approval voting thus creates a significant cognitive burden for
voters.
Ranked-Choice Voting
With ranked-choice voting, a voter ranks the candidates in order of
preference, similar to the picture above. In my view, this has the least
cognitive burden among the three methods discussed here. It is easy for a
voter to pick her favorite candidate, pick her second favorite, and so on.
This kind of ballot has low cognitive burden because a voter doesn't have
to consider which candidates are viable.
But, you may ask, "Doesn't a voter have to think about whether their second
and later preferences might hurt their first preference? For example,
should a Jill Stein supporter not rank Hillary second because it might help
Hillary beat Jill?"
The great think about ranked-choice voting is that the answer to this
question is a clear and resoundingNO!!! Your second and later choices
cannot harm your first choice! Your second preference is only ever
considered at all if your first preference has definitively lost. Voting
geeks cause this the later-no-harm criterion
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Later-no-harm_criterion.
Voters thus need to be educated that later choices do not hurt earlier
choices so that voters are encouraged to rank as many candidates as
possible. The more candidates a voter ranks, the greater influence the
voter has in the outcome of the election.
Accordingly, ranked-choice voting has the lowest cognitive burden. A voter
simply needs to select their first choice, second choice, and so forth.
The voter does not need to consider which candidates are viable.
(For voting geeks who are leaping out of their seats to make points about
other voting systems criteria
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Voting_system_criteria, please
keep reading.)
Other Stuff...
In my view, it is extremely important to make it as easy as possible for
voters to vote, and, for the reasons described above, ranked-choice voting
does this better than both plurality and approval voting.
I want to briefly address another form of ranked voting called Condorcet
voting. Condorcet voting also uses a ranked ballot, but the votes are
counted in a different way. Condorcet voting doesn't satisfy the
later-no-harm criterion mentioned above, so it is possible that your second
and later choices could hurt your first choices. The possibility, however,
that your second and later choices hurt your first choice is so small that,
for practical purposes, a voter to cannot take this into account, and thus
Condorcet voting has the same cognitive burden as ranked-choice voting.
While Condorcet voting is a great voting method, I still prefer
ranked-choice voting for public elections, and I'll address that in a
future blog post.
Another point to mention is that detractors of ranked-choice voting
complain that ranked-choice voting does not satisfy other voting systems
criteria, such as the monotonicity criterion
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monotonicity_criterion. While this is
certainly true, for practical purposes, a voter cannot take the
monotonicity criterion into account when casting a vote. It is just far
too complicated and you would need to know how everyone else is going to
vote. The non-monotonicity of ranked-choice voting thus doesn't create a
cognitive burden.
Please let me know what you think, especially if you disagree. I am happy
to post any well-reasoned dissent as comments or even give you the
opportunity to write your own blog post in rebuttal.
First off: thank you, Jeff, for a thought-provoking piece. I'm going to
disagree with you on some points, but it's clear that you're arguing in
good faith.
Second: I'm sorry, but I really can't bear the name "RCV" in a voting
methods discussion. I know that's what IRV is frequently called in actual
laws, but to me "ranked choice voting" is obviously the correct term for
the whole class of voting methods which includes Condorcet, Borda, and IRV;
not just for IRV alone.
So, on to the body of your argument: that (according to you) the cognitive
burden of IRV is lower than approval, Condorcet, or plurality.
I agree with you on one point: thinking in terms of cognitive burden is an
important, and productive, way to consider voting systems. I also
acknowledge that approval's apparent simplicity is less of an advantage
than one might think, once you consider the cognitive burden.
However, I strongly disagree with you that IRV has a low cognitive burden
in practice, for two reasons.
The first, and most important, is that IRV does not actually remove the
need for strategic thinking. Yes, it obeys LNH, so once you've decided to
rank your favorite in first place, you have no reason not to include your
second choice on the ballot too. But there's an important, and predictable,
class of election scenarios where it's strategically crucial NOT to rank
your favorite first: center squeeze scenarios. If you have two candidates
at ideological opposite points, with a third candidate in the middle near
the median voter, it is actually quite common for the center to have the
lowest first-choice support and get prematurely eliminated. This kind of
thing happened in Burlington 2009; in multiple recent French elections;
tragically, in Egypt 2011; and would have happened in the US 2000 if Nader
had gotten over 25%. In this case, the correct strategy for one group of
voters is to rank their true first choice in second place. Understanding
this, and correctly seeing when it applies, is a HUGE cognitive burden for
IRV voters.
Second, IRV requires strict ranking. That's a nontrivial cognitive burden
when there are more than a handful of candidates. If there were 15
candidates in a race, how should a voter decide exactly which of them to
give 8th preference? It's much easier to use absolute grades, as in
Majority Judgment. (Behavioural research bears this out; strict ranking is
harder than rating, for anything more than 3 or 4 options.)
On the other hand: is the strategic burden for approval voters actually
that high? I think not. Consider the rule used by Ka-Ping Yee in his voting
system visualizations http://zesty.ca/voting/sim/: a randomly-assigned
strict threshold. This requires no strategic doublethink, yet leads to
near-ideal outcomes under his assumptions. My point is that under approval
sophisticated strategy is not nearly as important as under IRV.
But still, I think you have a point. Approval does have a cognitive burden,
and we should account for that. That's precisely why I've been working on
MAS (majority acceptable score) as an option: it's a simple 3-level voting
system with an absolute minimum of cognitive burden. I believe that under
MAS, in basically all everyday voting scenarios, a naive sincere ballot
will be strategically optimal, or close enough to it that most voters
wouldn't care.
Jameson
ps. You mention Condorcet, and argue that the strategic cognitive burden is
higher than IRV. I disagree; but since Condorcet comes with a higher
cognitive burden in just figuring out why a given candidate won, I agree
that Condorcet methods are probably not best for large-scale elections.
2016-10-11 8:54 GMT-04:00 Jeff O'Neill jeff.oneill@opavote.com:
I recently wrote a blog post explaining why I prefer ranked-choice voting
(i.e., IRV or alternative vote) to approval voting. It is a quite
different kind of argument than most of the posts here because it is a
policy argument rather than a mathematical one. Nevertheless, I thought
people here might find it interesting. I'd love to hear your comments and
any counterarguments as well.
I've copied the post below and you can also find it here:
http://blog.opavote.com/2016/10/why-i-prefer-ranked-choice
-voting-to.html
Why I prefer ranked-choice voting to approval voting
https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-zufbCki-BVo/V_o1-OKl27I/AAAAAAAAASM/vrix1OAitpsQ4MhGoPunWk38sNcWu-qPwCLcB/s1600/rcv%2Bballot.png
Voting is not an easy task for a voter. I don't mean taking time off
work, getting to the polls, and waiting in line, etc. I mean, when you are
standing there in the ballot box, you have to decide what vote you want to
cast given the options presented to you. For example, a Jill Stein
supporter may be torn between supporting her favorite candidate and voting
for a candidate who has a better chance of winning the election. I'll
refer to this as the cognitive burden of expressing your vote.
In this post, I'll address the cognitive burden of three different types
of voting:
1. Plurality voting (i.e., selecting one candidate)
2. Approval Voting
3. Ranked-choice voting
OpaVote http://www.opavote.com/ supports all three of these voting
methods if you want to try them out yourself.
Plurality Voting
Plurality voting is very simple, a voter simply picks one candidate.
There is, however, a cognitive burden when there are more than two
candidates. A voter presumably wants her vote to matter. Accordingly, a
voter should not necessarily select her favorite candidate, but instead
select her favorite candidate who has a reasonable chance of being elected.
Consider the current U.S. Presidential election. I'm a big supporter of
the Green Party, but Jill Stein is not going to win the election. I'd like
to vote for the Green Party, but instead I'll vote for Hillary because that
is the best way for my vote to make a difference. Others will vote for the
Green Party out of principle.
Where there are more viable candidates, the cognitive burden is much
higher. The French 2012 elections for President had ten candidates in
the first round. A voter thus needed to consider which candidates had a
chance of winning, and then select her favorite among those who had a
chance of winning.
Approval Voting
With approval voting, a voter has the option to approve as many candidates
as they like. The candidate with the most approvals is the winner. For
someone whose first choice is Jill, the voter may, for example, approve of
Jill and Hillary and not approve Donald and Gary.
Approval voting, like plurality voting, is very simple in practice. A
voter just selects one or more candidates. But Approval voting suffers
from similar cognitive burdens as plurality voting. How do you draw the
line between candidates you approve and candidates you don't approve?
Consider a voter whose true preferences are:
1. Jill Stein
2. Hillary Clinton
3. Gary Johnson
4. Donald Trump
Clearly, this voter will approve Jill and will not approve Donald, but
what should she do with the other two candidates? Should she also approve
Hillary? Giving Hillary an approval may help Hillary beat Jill, but she
would certainly prefer Hillary to Gary or Donald. Similarly, this voter
may not like Gary, but she may dislike Donald so much that it is worthwhile
to approve Gary to minimize the chance that Donald is elected.
Phew... that is a lot of thinking to do. It would be even harder if Jill
and Gary had better chances of being elected.
In sum, approving any candidates other than your favorite can hurt your
favorite. Not approving candidates can help your least favorite get
elected. Approval voting thus creates a significant cognitive burden for
voters.
Ranked-Choice Voting
With ranked-choice voting, a voter ranks the candidates in order of
preference, similar to the picture above. In my view, this has the least
cognitive burden among the three methods discussed here. It is easy for a
voter to pick her favorite candidate, pick her second favorite, and so on.
This kind of ballot has low cognitive burden because a voter doesn't have
to consider which candidates are viable.
But, you may ask, "Doesn't a voter have to think about whether their
second and later preferences might hurt their first preference? For
example, should a Jill Stein supporter not rank Hillary second because it
might help Hillary beat Jill?"
The great think about ranked-choice voting is that the answer to this
question is a clear and resoundingNO!!! Your second and later choices
cannot harm your first choice! Your second preference is only ever
considered at all if your first preference has definitively lost. Voting
geeks cause this the later-no-harm criterion
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Later-no-harm_criterion.
Voters thus need to be educated that later choices do not hurt earlier
choices so that voters are encouraged to rank as many candidates as
possible. The more candidates a voter ranks, the greater influence the
voter has in the outcome of the election.
Accordingly, ranked-choice voting has the lowest cognitive burden. A
voter simply needs to select their first choice, second choice, and so
forth. The voter does not need to consider which candidates are viable.
(For voting geeks who are leaping out of their seats to make points about
other voting systems criteria
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Voting_system_criteria, please
keep reading.)
Other Stuff...
In my view, it is extremely important to make it as easy as possible for
voters to vote, and, for the reasons described above, ranked-choice voting
does this better than both plurality and approval voting.
I want to briefly address another form of ranked voting called Condorcet
voting. Condorcet voting also uses a ranked ballot, but the votes are
counted in a different way. Condorcet voting doesn't satisfy the
later-no-harm criterion mentioned above, so it is possible that your
second and later choices could hurt your first choices. The possibility,
however, that your second and later choices hurt your first choice is so
small that, for practical purposes, a voter to cannot take this into
account, and thus Condorcet voting has the same cognitive burden as
ranked-choice voting. While Condorcet voting is a great voting method, I
still prefer ranked-choice voting for public elections, and I'll address
that in a future blog post.
Another point to mention is that detractors of ranked-choice voting
complain that ranked-choice voting does not satisfy other voting systems
criteria, such as the monotonicity criterion
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monotonicity_criterion. While this is
certainly true, for practical purposes, a voter cannot take the
monotonicity criterion into account when casting a vote. It is just far
too complicated and you would need to know how everyone else is going to
vote. The non-monotonicity of ranked-choice voting thus doesn't create a
cognitive burden.
Please let me know what you think, especially if you disagree. I am happy
to post any well-reasoned dissent as comments or even give you the
opportunity to write your own blog post in rebuttal.
Election-Methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info
(Replying farther down)
On Oct 11, 2016 5:54 AM, "Jeff O'Neill" jeff.oneill@opavote.com wrote:
I recently wrote a blog post explaining why I prefer ranked-choice voting
(i.e., IRV or alternative vote)
(endquote)
"Ranked Choice Voting" is a seriously misleading name for IRV. If falsely
implies that IRV is the only ranking method.
(Replying farther down)
You continued:
...to approval voting. It is a quite different kind of argument than most
of the posts here because it is a policy argument rather than a
mathematical one. Nevertheless, I thought people here might find it
interesting. I'd love to hear your comments and any counterarguments as
well.
I've copied the post below and you can also find it here:
Why I prefer ranked-choice voting to approval voting...
(endquote)
The arguments below assume that the voter has to strategize to get the best
winner s/hw can get, based on predictive information. That's only an
assumption.
For all or nearly all voters, there exists a set of candidates such that
electing from that set is more important than the matter of which member
of that set wins... or which candidate outside that set wins, if that
happens.
I call that set your "operational top-set". For short, I just call it your
" top set".
I suggest that only the very best candidates should be in your top set.
Predictive information is unreliable, especially with our disinfomational
mass media, which consists of a propaganda apparatus.
But your optimal strategy is to fully support your top-set, to maximize the
probability (Pt) of electing from your top-set.
...which doesn't need predictive information.
In Approval, just approve (only) your top set.
Don't make voting more complicated & difficult than it is.
(Replying farther down)
You continued:
Voting is not an easy task for a voter. I don't mean taking time off
work, getting to the polls, and waiting in line, etc. I mean, when you are
standing there in the ballot box, you have to decide what vote you want to
cast given the options presented to you. For example, a Jill Stein
supporter may be torn between supporting her favorite candidate and voting
for a candidate who has a better chance of winning the election.
(endquote)
...but whom you don't like? No dilemma there, even if you insist on
unnecessarily strategically complicating your voting.
(Replying farther down)
I'll refer to this as the cognitive burden of expressing your vote.
In this post, I'll address the cognitive burden of three different types
of voting:
Plurality voting (i.e., selecting one candidate)
Approval Voting
Ranked-choice voting
OpaVote supports all three of these voting methods if you want to try
them out yourself.
Plurality Voting
Plurality voting is very simple, a voter simply picks one candidate.
There is, however, a cognitive burden when there are more than two
candidates. A voter presumably wants her vote to matter. Accordingly, a
voter should not necessarily select her favorite candidate, but instead
select her favorite candidate who has a reasonable chance of being elected.
Consider the current U.S. Presidential election. I'm a big supporter of
the Green Party, but Jill Stein is not going to win the election.
(endquote)
You might be surprised by what would be possible in an honest, legitimate
election with verifiable vote-counting.
But, yes, without honest verifiable vote-counting, Jill can't "win", even
if everyone votes for her.
So demand verifiable vote-counting before worrying about the voting system.
Boycott our illegitimate election. Have big pro-democracy demonstrations,
all around the country, demanding verifiable vote-counting... legimate
elections.
You continue:
I'd like to vote for the Green Party, but instead I'll vote for Hillary.
(endquote)
Do you like her?
When you vote for a lesser evil, you don't get a good.
When you vote for the same, you'll never get anything different or better.
At least, with Approval, you can still top-vote Jill, and not vote Hillary
over her.
The progressives differ from Hillary by being honest, uncorrupt, and in
offering what people (not Hillary's corporate owners) actually want.
It's a clear-cut yes/no question. ...making it obvious who should be in
your top-set.
...not Hillary.
You continue:
because that is the best way for my vote to make a difference.
You call Hillary a "difference"?
Keep on electing corrupt Republocrats, & you'll never make a difference.
Others will vote for the Green Party out of principle.
...or a preference for genuine
Improvement.
Better yet, boycott the illegitimate elections & demand verifiable
vote-counting.
(Replying farther down)
Where there are more viable candidates, the cognitive burden is much
higher. The French 2012 elections for President had ten candidates in the
first round. A voter thus needed to consider which candidates had a chance
of winning, and then select her favorite among those who had a chance of
winning.
Approval Voting
With approval voting, a voter has the option to approve as many
candidates as they like. The candidate with the most approvals is the
winner. For someone whose first choice is Jill, the voter may, for example,
approve of Jill and Hillary and not approve Donald and Gary.
...if the voter is an overcompromising lesser-evil voter.
Approval voting, like plurality voting, is very simple in practice. A
voter just selects one or more candidates. But Approval voting suffers
from similar cognitive burdens as plurality voting. How do you draw the
line between candidates you approve and candidates you don't approve?
(endquote)
How about by the matter of whether they're a any good?
Honest. Not bought or corrupt.
Can you really say that you approve of Hillary?
Consider a voter whose true preferences are:
Jill Stein
Hillary Clinton
Gary Johnson
Donald Trump
Clearly, this voter will approve Jill and will not approve Donald, but
what should she do with the other two candidates? Should she also approve
Hillary?
See above.
You continued:
Giving Hillary an approval may help Hillary beat Jill, but she would
certainly prefer Hillary to Gary or Donald. Similarly, this voter may not
like Gary, but she may dislike Donald so much that it is worthwhile to
approve Gary to minimize the chance that Donald is elected.
(endquote)
Forgot your strategy-dilemma, and approve (only) those who are any good.
Phew... that is a lot of thinking to do. It would be even harder if Jill
and Gary had better chances of being elected.
But yes, a good ranking method could be psychologically helpful, for
overcompromisers.
You advocate IRV. It's better than Plurality, because it meets Mutual
Majority, & has no chicken-dilemma.
But it doesn't allow adequate protection for the Condorcet winner (CW),
the candidate publicly preferred to all the others.
That's why IRV was repealed in Burlington. Did FairVote convince you that
the Burlington debacle doesn't matter? Wrong.
Other than Plurality, any voting system would be better than IRV.
Approval would be much better.
I suggest this merit-ranking:
- 3-Slot ICT
- Approval
- Score
- Plain MMPO
- Bucklin
(....in the versions that allow equal top ranking)
If rankings are psychologically necessary, as they may well be, then that
leaves MMPO & Bucklin.
IRV is fine for you, as an individual, if you're majority-favored (MF).
A voter is MF if a majority prefer at least some of hir top-set to everyone
else.
If you aren't MF, then IRV is the worst there is , except for Plurality.
Conclusion of reply.
Michael Ossipoff
In sum, approving any candidates other than your favorite can hurt your
favorite. Not approving candidates can help your least favorite get
elected. Approval voting thus creates a significant cognitive burden for
voters.
Ranked-Choice Voting
With ranked-choice voting, a voter ranks the candidates in order of
preference, similar to the picture above. In my view, this has the least
cognitive burden among the three methods discussed here. It is easy for a
voter to pick her favorite candidate, pick her second favorite, and so on.
This kind of ballot has low cognitive burden because a voter doesn't have
to consider which candidates are viable.
But, you may ask, "Doesn't a voter have to think about whether their
second and later preferences might hurt their first preference? For
example, should a Jill Stein supporter not rank Hillary second because it
might help Hillary beat Jill?"
The great think about ranked-choice voting is that the answer to this
question is a clear and resoundingNO!!! Your second and later choices
cannot harm your first choice! Your second preference is only ever
considered at all if your first preference has definitively lost. Voting
geeks cause this the later-no-harm criterion.
Voters thus need to be educated that later choices do not hurt earlier
choices so that voters are encouraged to rank as many candidates as
possible. The more candidates a voter ranks, the greater influence the
voter has in the outcome of the election.
Accordingly, ranked-choice voting has the lowest cognitive burden. A
voter simply needs to select their first choice, second choice, and so
forth. The voter does not need to consider which candidates are viable.
(For voting geeks who are leaping out of their seats to make points about
other voting systems criteria, please keep reading.)
Other Stuff...
In my view, it is extremely important to make it as easy as possible for
voters to vote, and, for the reasons described above, ranked-choice voting
does this better than both plurality and approval voting.
I want to briefly address another form of ranked voting called Condorcet
voting. Condorcet voting also uses a ranked ballot, but the votes are
counted in a different way. Condorcet voting doesn't satisfy the
later-no-harm criterion mentioned above, so it is possible that your second
and later choices could hurt your first choices. The possibility, however,
that your second and later choices hurt your first choice is so small that,
for practical purposes, a voter to cannot take this into account, and thus
Condorcet voting has the same cognitive burden as ranked-choice voting.
While Condorcet voting is a great voting method, I still prefer
ranked-choice voting for public elections, and I'll address that in a
future blog post.
Another point to mention is that detractors of ranked-choice voting
complain that ranked-choice voting does not satisfy other voting systems
criteria, such as the monotonicity criterion. While this is certainly
true, for practical purposes, a voter cannot take the monotonicity
criterion into account when casting a vote. It is just far too complicated
and you would need to know how everyone else is going to vote. The
non-monotonicity of ranked-choice voting thus doesn't create a cognitive
burden.
Please let me know what you think, especially if you disagree. I am
happy to post any well-reasoned dissent as comments or even give you the
opportunity to write your own blog post in rebuttal.
Hi Jameson, Ralph, Robert, and Michael,
I'm responding to all of your emails together though most of my comments
are responding to Jameson.
Second: I'm sorry, but I really can't bear the name "RCV" in a voting
methods discussion. I know that's what IRV is frequently called in actual
laws, but to me "ranked choice voting" is obviously the correct term for
the whole class of voting methods which includes Condorcet, Borda, and IRV;
not just for IRV alone.
I agree that the terminology is difficult and that RCV could and perhaps
should apply to any method where votes are ranked.
But there's an important, and predictable, class of election scenarios
where it's strategically crucial NOT to rank your favorite first: center
squeeze scenarios. If you have two candidates at ideological opposite
points, with a third candidate in the middle near the median voter, it is
actually quite common for the center to have the lowest first-choice
support and get prematurely eliminated. This kind of thing happened in
Burlington 2009; in multiple recent French elections; tragically, in Egypt
2011; and would have happened in the US 2000 if Nader had gotten over 25%.
In this case, the correct strategy for one group of voters is to rank their
true first choice in second place. Understanding this, and correctly seeing
when it applies, is a HUGE cognitive burden for IRV voters.
When you say that "it is actually quite common for the center to have the
lowest first-choice support and get prematurely eliminated," we need to
clarify "quite common." If you mean 5-10% of the time, then I could
believe that, but if you mean 50% of the time, then I would disagree. It
would be really interesting if a statistician could collect the data and
present results.
I can't comment on Burlington or Egypt. For the French elections, the
center candidate is generally in the top three of 10-15 candidates
(depending on the year). Candidates that came later than that top 5 have
very little support.
My main point here, however, is that, except in rare situations, voters are
not capable of voting strategically to account for a center candidate out
of the top two (and by this I mean normal voters, not the people on this
list). First, it isn't clear how often the center candidate is out of the
top two. Second, voters would need to think deeply about how the voting
system works. third, you need precise polling information. Fourth, if you
are too successful in your strategic plan, it backfires. There is this
middle ground where enough voters have to vote strategically to get their
desired result but not so many that you overshoot and still elect the wrong
candidate. A few people (like the people on this list) may consider such a
scenario when voting, but I think it is far too complicated for any
significant subset of voters to consider it.
Second, IRV requires strict ranking. That's a nontrivial cognitive burden
when there are more than a handful of candidates. If there were 15
candidates in a race, how should a voter decide exactly which of them to
give 8th preference? It's much easier to use absolute grades, as in
Majority Judgment. (Behavioural research bears this out; strict ranking is
harder than rating, for anything more than 3 or 4 options.)
This makes sense, but I don't think it matters so much. For most RCV
elections, nearly all ballots end up at one of their top 3 or 4 choices.
Rankings after this don't matter much. Also, if a person has trouble
deciding who to rank 7th and 8th, then perhaps the person doesn't have a
strong preference between them and would be equally happy (or more likely
equally unhappy) with either.
On the other hand: is the strategic burden for approval voters actually
that high? I think not. Consider the rule used by Ka-Ping Yee in his voting
system visualizations http://zesty.ca/voting/sim/: a randomly-assigned
strict threshold. This requires no strategic doublethink, yet leads to
near-ideal outcomes under his assumptions. My point is that under approval
sophisticated strategy is not nearly as important as under IRV.
Thanks for recommending this. I'll have to check this out.
But still, I think you have a point. Approval does have a cognitive burden,
and we should account for that. That's precisely why I've been working on
MAS (majority acceptable score) as an option: it's a simple 3-level voting
system with an absolute minimum of cognitive burden. I believe that under
MAS, in basically all everyday voting scenarios, a naive sincere ballot
will be strategically optimal, or close enough to it that most voters
wouldn't care.
I'll check that out too
ps. You mention Condorcet, and argue that the strategic cognitive burden
is higher than IRV. I disagree; but since Condorcet comes with a higher
cognitive burden in just figuring out why a given candidate won, I agree
that Condorcet methods are probably not best for large-scale elections.
I actually wrote "Condorcet voting has the same cognitive burden as
ranked-choice voting". So we agree on this, and I also agree with your
second point.
A quick response to Ralph: I agree that approval is great and even
preferable to RCV for some things, such as informal meetings. Even for
city council though, I would prefer a ranked vote.
Ralph and Robert also made comments about the cognitive burden of
understanding how the votes were counted. That is a different topic so I
don't want to get distracted from the main point I was trying to make.
Michael, sorry, but I couldn't follow most of your comments. I'm not a
regular reader of this email list, so I don't think I have the necessary
background.
But there's an important, and predictable, class of election scenarios
where it's strategically crucial NOT to rank your favorite first: center
squeeze scenarios. If you have two candidates at ideological opposite
points, with a third candidate in the middle near the median voter, it is
actually quite common for the center to have the lowest first-choice
support and get prematurely eliminated. This kind of thing happened in
Burlington 2009; in multiple recent French elections; tragically, in Egypt
2011; and would have happened in the US 2000 if Nader had gotten over 25%.
In this case, the correct strategy for one group of voters is to rank their
true first choice in second place. Understanding this, and correctly seeing
when it applies, is a HUGE cognitive burden for IRV voters.
When you say that "it is actually quite common for the center to have the
lowest first-choice support and get prematurely eliminated," we need to
clarify "quite common." If you mean 5-10% of the time, then I could
believe that, but if you mean 50% of the time, then I would disagree. It
would be really interesting if a statistician could collect the data and
present results.
Depends on various factors, but generally I'd put it in the 10%-50% range.
It's happened in 2 of the last 4 French presidential elections so 50% is
not a crazy estimate.
I can't comment on Burlington or Egypt. For the French elections, the
center candidate is generally in the top three of 10-15 candidates
(depending on the year). Candidates that came later than that top 5 have
very little support.
"Generally in the top 3" is no comfort if the Condorcet winner is
eliminated third-from-last.
My main point here, however, is that, except in rare situations, voters
are not capable of voting strategically to account for a center candidate
out of the top two (and by this I mean normal voters, not the people on
this list). First, it isn't clear how often the center candidate is out of
the top two. Second, voters would need to think deeply about how the
voting system works. third, you need precise polling information. Fourth,
if you are too successful in your strategic plan, it backfires. There is
this middle ground where enough voters have to vote strategically to get
their desired result but not so many that you overshoot and still elect the
wrong candidate. A few people (like the people on this list) may consider
such a scenario when voting, but I think it is far too complicated for any
significant subset of voters to consider it.
There are two possibilities. Either voters can strategize effectively, or
they can't. If they can, it's a burden, and it favors the groups who can.
If they can't, then you get unrepresentative results, where a majority
would have favored another specific option. As in Burlington, that can lead
to repealing the system itself.
This makes sense, but I don't think it matters so much. For most RCV
elections, nearly all ballots end up at one of their top 3 or 4 choices.
Rankings after this don't matter much. Also, if a person has trouble
deciding who to rank 7th and 8th, then perhaps the person doesn't have a
strong preference between them and would be equally happy (or more likely
equally unhappy) with either.
What if you can't easily distinguish #7 from #8, but you can easily
distinguish either of them from #15, and it turns out that #8 is the only
one who could beat #15?
Jeff,
IRV's compliance with the Later-no-Harm criterion is a nice selling
point aimed at nervous or sceptical voters
who are used to and content with FPP, but I think it is far from the
method's greatest feature.
If voters who only care about their favourites can influence the fate of
other candidates without any risk at all,
that encourages them to express very weak light-minded preferences
and/or to blindly go along with preference
deals that might be corrupt or cynical and unprincipled.
IRV also meets Later-no-Help, which I think is a very good thing. And I
rate IRV as the best of the methods that meet it.
Some weak truncation incentive is desirable, but Approval's is far too
strong.
Where there are more viable candidates, the cognitive burden is much
higher. The French 2012 elections for President had ten candidates in
the first round. A voter thus needed to consider which candidates had
a chance of winning, and then select her favorite among those who had
a chance of winning.
A more devious strategy may be available. If the voter is sure that,
among the candidates with some chance of winning, her favourite will
make it to the final without her help, then she can vote for the
candidate that (among those with some chance of making it to the top-2)
that her favourite would have the greatest chance of beating in the
second round.
That is called the Push-over strategy.
A while ago I suggested that one way to improve Top-Two Runoff would be
to use Approval in the first round, and if the most approved
candidate A isn't approved on more than half the ballots in the first
round then have a second-round runoff between A and the candidate
with the most approval-opposition to A (i.e. the candidate that is most
approved on ballots that didn't approve A.)
I want to briefly address another form of ranked voting called
Condorcet voting. Condorcet voting also uses a ranked ballot, but the
votes are counted in a different way.
While Condorcet voting is a great voting method, ...
"Condorcet voting" isn't decisive enough to qualify as a "voting
method". Condorcet is just a criterion (or a category of methods that
meet the criterion).
Min-Max Margins, Schulze (Winning Votes), Smith//Approval, "Benham"
(check for a CW among remaining candidates before each IRV-style
elimination)
are all very different methods that happen to meet the Condorcet criterion.
Chris Benham
On 10/11/2016 11:24 PM, Jeff O'Neill wrote:
I recently wrote a blog post explaining why I prefer ranked-choice
voting (i.e., IRV or alternative vote) to approval voting. It is a
quite different kind of argument than most of the posts here because
it is a policy argument rather than a mathematical one. Nevertheless,
I thought people here might find it interesting. I'd love to hear
your comments and any counterarguments as well.
I've copied the post below and you can also find it here:
http://blog.opavote.com/2016/10/why-i-prefer-ranked-choice-voting-to.html
http://blog.opavote.com/2016/10/why-i-prefer-ranked-choice-voting-to.html
Why I prefer ranked-choice voting to approval voting
https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-zufbCki-BVo/V_o1-OKl27I/AAAAAAAAASM/vrix1OAitpsQ4MhGoPunWk38sNcWu-qPwCLcB/s1600/rcv%2Bballot.png
Voting is not an easy task for a voter. I don't mean taking time off
work, getting to the polls, and waiting in line, etc. I mean, when
you are standing there in the ballot box, you have to decide what vote
you want to cast given the options presented to you. For example, a
Jill Stein supporter may be torn between supporting her favorite
candidate and voting for a candidate who has a better chance of
winning the election. I'll refer to this as the /cognitive burden/ of
expressing your vote.
In this post, I'll address the cognitive burden of three different
types of voting:
- Plurality voting (i.e., selecting one candidate)
- Approval Voting
- Ranked-choice voting
OpaVote http://www.opavote.com/ supports all three of these voting
methods if you want to try them out yourself.
Plurality Voting
Plurality voting is very simple, a voter simply picks one candidate.
There is, however, a cognitive burden when there are more than two
candidates. A voter presumably wants her vote to matter.
Accordingly, a voter should not necessarily select her favorite
candidate, but instead select her favorite candidate who has a
reasonable chance of being elected.
Consider the current U.S. Presidential election. I'm a big supporter
of the Green Party, but Jill Stein is not going to win the election.
I'd like to vote for the Green Party, but instead I'll vote for
Hillary because that is the best way for my vote to make a
difference. Others will vote for the Green Party out of principle.
Where there are more viable candidates, the cognitive burden is much
higher. The French 2012 elections for President had ten candidates in
the first round. A voter thus needed to consider which candidates had
a chance of winning, and then select her favorite among those who had
a chance of winning.
Approval Voting
With approval voting, a voter has the option to approve as many
candidates as they like. The candidate with the most approvals is the
winner. For someone whose first choice is Jill, the voter may, for
example, approve of Jill and Hillary and not approve Donald and Gary.
Approval voting, like plurality voting, is very simple in practice. A
voter just selects one or more candidates. But Approval voting
suffers from similar cognitive burdens as plurality voting. How do you
draw the line between candidates you approve and candidates you don't
approve?
Consider a voter whose true preferences are:
- Jill Stein
- Hillary Clinton
- Gary Johnson
- Donald Trump
Clearly, this voter will approve Jill and will not approve Donald, but
what should she do with the other two candidates? Should she also
approve Hillary? Giving Hillary an approval may help Hillary beat
Jill, but she would certainly prefer Hillary to Gary or Donald.
Similarly, this voter may not like Gary, but she may dislike Donald so
much that it is worthwhile to approve Gary to minimize the chance that
Donald is elected.
Phew... that is a lot of thinking to do. It would be even harder if
Jill and Gary had better chances of being elected.
In sum, approving any candidates other than your favorite can hurt
your favorite. Not approving candidates can help your least favorite
get elected. Approval voting thus creates a significant cognitive
burden for voters.
Ranked-Choice Voting
With ranked-choice voting, a voter ranks the candidates in order of
preference, similar to the picture above. In my view, this has the
least cognitive burden among the three methods discussed here. It is
easy for a voter to pick her favorite candidate, pick her second
favorite, and so on. This kind of ballot has low cognitive burden
because a voter doesn't have to consider which candidates are viable.
But, you may ask, "Doesn't a voter have to think about whether their
second and later preferences might hurt their first preference? For
example, should a Jill Stein supporter not rank Hillary second because
it might help Hillary beat Jill?"
The great thing about ranked-choice voting is that the answer to this
question is a clear and resoundingNO!!! Your second and later choices
cannot harm your first choice! Your second preference is only ever
considered at all if your first preference has definitively lost.
Voting geeks cause this the later-no-harm criterion
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Later-no-harm_criterion.
Voters thus need to be educated that later choices do not hurt earlier
choices so that voters are encouraged to rank as many candidates as
possible. The more candidates a voter ranks, the greater influence
the voter has in the outcome of the election.
Accordingly, ranked-choice voting has the lowest cognitive burden. A
voter simply needs to select their first choice, second choice, and so
forth. The voter does not need to consider which candidates are viable.
(For voting geeks who are leaping out of their seats to make points
about other voting systems criteria
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Voting_system_criteria,
please keep reading.)
Other Stuff...
In my view, it is extremely important to make it as easy as possible
for voters to vote, and, for the reasons described above,
ranked-choice voting does this better than both plurality and approval
voting.
I want to briefly address another form of ranked voting called
Condorcet voting. Condorcet voting also uses a ranked ballot, but the
votes are counted in a different way. Condorcet voting doesn't
satisfy the later-no-harm criterion mentioned above, so it is
possible that your second and later choices could hurt your first
choices. The possibility, however, that your second and later choices
hurt your first choice is so small that, for practical purposes, a
voter to cannot take this into account, and thus Condorcet voting has
the same cognitive burden as ranked-choice voting. While Condorcet
voting is a great voting method, I still prefer ranked-choice voting
for public elections, and I'll address that in a future blog post.
Another point to mention is that detractors of ranked-choice voting
complain that ranked-choice voting does not satisfy other voting
systems criteria, such as the monotonicity criterion
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monotonicity_criterion. While this is
certainly true, for practical purposes, a voter cannot take the
monotonicity criterion into account when casting a vote. It is just
far too complicated and you would need to know how everyone else is
going to vote. The non-monotonicity of ranked-choice voting thus
doesn't create a cognitive burden.
Please let me know what you think, especially if you disagree. I am
happy to post any well-reasoned dissent as comments or even give you
the opportunity to write your own blog post in rebuttal.
Election-Methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info
---------------------------- Original Message ----------------------------
Subject: Re: [EM] Why I prefer ranked-choice voting to approval voting
From: "C.Benham" cbenham@adam.com.au
Date: Sat, October 15, 2016 11:01 am
To: election-methods@lists.electorama.com
I want to briefly address another form of ranked voting called
Condorcet voting. Condorcet voting also uses a ranked ballot, but the
votes are counted in a different way.
While Condorcet voting is a great voting method, ...
"Condorcet voting" isn't decisive enough to qualify as a "voting
method". Condorcet is just a criterion (or a category of methods that
meet the criterion).
Min-Max Margins, Schulze (Winning Votes), Smith//Approval, "Benham"
(check for a CW among remaining candidates before each IRV-style
elimination)
are all very different methods that happen to meet the Condorcet criterion.
forgot Tideman (ranked-pairs).
�
regarding semantics: �i think that it is loosely appropriate, in discussion here and in discussion among the laity to use the term "Condorcet
method" or "Condorcet voting" as any of the Condorcet-compliant methods for the sake of discussion to differentiate ranked-choice methods from each other. �i.e. Condorcet vs. IRV or Condorcet vs. Bucklin or Condorcet vs. Borda . �the different Condorcet-compliant methods
potentially differ in outcome only when there is a cycle, which in real elections continues to appear to be a rare occurrence. �not only that, at least when margins are considered and there is only three candidates in the cycle, the outcome of Schulze and Ranked Pairs and Min-Max appear to the
same. �so, as rare as cycles are, even rarer in the real world are cycles with a Smith set of more than 3 candidates. �so i think, as long as we may leave the details about what to do about cycles to a future debate, it's an acceptable semantic to use the term "Condorcet method"
or "Condorcet voting" in the discussion of RCV.
�
that said, i think any of these Condorcet methods are far better than IRV because when IRV actually fails to elect the CW (which has happened in reality in a governmental election in 2009), even if voters don't know or
understand exactly what went wrong, they know something did and Ranked-Choice Voting (in general) is discredited along with IRV. �so also are other voting reforms. �Fairvote doesn't get it and even after the experience of 2009, they push IRV portraying it as the only way of reform
realizing RCV, which is explicitly dishonest. �and they don't get it that somewhere, sometime again, they will get a skeptical jurisdiction to adopt IRV and when it fails again (which may well happen when there are three equally viable candidates), IRV (and, by dishonest association, RCV) will
be again discredited.
�
still seems that Condorcet -> Ranked Pairs -> Margins is the simplest, mostly fair (doesn't deviate from Schulze-Margins) method to simply adopt this principle: "When more voters mark their ballots that they prefer Candidate A over Candidate B than the number of voters who
prefer the contrary, then Candidate B is not elected." �Who can argue with that?? �Whenever Candidate B is elected when more of us wanted Candidate A or Candidate C or someone else, i mean WTF? �how can anyone who believes in majority rule and one-person-one-vote disagree with
that?
�
--
r b-j � � � � � � � � �rbj@audioimagination.com
"Imagination is more important than knowledge."
�
---------------------------- Original Message ----------------------------
Subject: Re: [EM] Why I prefer ranked-choice voting to approval voting
From: "robert bristow-johnson" rbj@audioimagination.com
Date: Sat, October 15, 2016 12:33 pm
To: election-methods@lists.electorama.com
still seems that Condorcet -> Ranked Pairs -> Margins is the simplest, mostly fair (doesn't deviate from Schulze-Margins) method to simply adopt this principle: "When more voters mark their ballots that they prefer Candidate A over Candidate B than the number of voters who�prefer the
contrary, then Candidate B is not elected."
i forgot to add the qualification that RP-Margins does not elect a different winner than Schulze-Margins in the case of a cycle involving only three candidates.
(and, if adopted in governmental elections, i believe it would be ultra-rare
that there is a cycle involving more than three candidates, and in that case, it's such a clusterfuck that any claim that one method's winner is more legit than another method's winner would be a dubious claim.)
--
�
r b-j � � � � � � � � �rbj@audioimagination.com
�
"Imagination is more important than knowledge."
Jeff:
My reply was mostly to your justification of your lesser-evil voting.
As for IRV, it can be said more simply:
IRV was repealed in Burlington because it violated majority wishes. The
Democrat it eliminated was someone who was majority-preferred to everyone
else.
A majority consisting of Democrats & Republicans wanted the Democrat
instead of the Progressive.
That's what the Republicans thought that they were ensuring when they
ranked the Democrat in 2nd place:
...the Republican, but, if not him, then at least the Democrat.
IRV quite disregarded their voted 2nd choice, and elected someone over whom
a majority preferred the Democrat (and had voted that preference).
So, was it any surprise when a dis-satisfied majority repealed IRV?
That problem was something that a lot of people had been explaining to Rob
Ritchie, for about 30 years.
No doubt Richie, &/or his FairVote organization, had assured Burlington
that "it will never happen".
The voters in Burlington realized that a dishonest salesman bad sold them
junk.
The candidate whom the electorate collectively prefers to each of the
others is called the " sincere Condorcet winner ". We can abbreviate that
as " CWs".
Sorry if that sounds technical.
No voting-system can guarantee that the CWs will always win.
But the better methods, like Approval, Score & Bucklin, gjve hir a better
chance than IRV did in Burlington.
IRV gave the win elsewhere in a way that the people in Burlington rightly
perceived as arbitrary.
For one thing, Approval, Score, & Bucklin allow the CWs's preferrers a
better chance to protect hir win, to not give it away.
For another thing, the Republicans' support for the Democrat would have
been counted, where IRV ignored it.
IRV in Burlington left the Democrats helpless in that regard. And, without
ranking the Democrat in 1st place, over their favorite, the Republicans
couldn't save him either.
FairVote are promoters. People convinced by them become uncritical
believers.
Neither are helpful.
Leave voting-system recommendation to people who are willing to consider
the possibilities, as opposed to people committed to one organization's
doctrine.
If you're the latter, please don't help.
Michael Ossipoff
On Oct 15, 2016 5:42 AM, "Jeff O'Neill" jeff.oneill@opavote.com wrote:
Hi Jameson, Ralph, Robert, and Michael,
I'm responding to all of your emails together though most of my comments
are responding to Jameson.
Second: I'm sorry, but I really can't bear the name "RCV" in a voting
methods discussion. I know that's what IRV is frequently called in actual
laws, but to me "ranked choice voting" is obviously the correct term for
the whole class of voting methods which includes Condorcet, Borda, and IRV;
not just for IRV alone.
I agree that the terminology is difficult and that RCV could and perhaps
should apply to any method where votes are ranked.
But there's an important, and predictable, class of election scenarios
where it's strategically crucial NOT to rank your favorite first: center
squeeze scenarios. If you have two candidates at ideological opposite
points, with a third candidate in the middle near the median voter, it is
actually quite common for the center to have the lowest first-choice
support and get prematurely eliminated. This kind of thing happened in
Burlington 2009; in multiple recent French elections; tragically, in Egypt
2011; and would have happened in the US 2000 if Nader had gotten over 25%.
In this case, the correct strategy for one group of voters is to rank their
true first choice in second place. Understanding this, and correctly seeing
when it applies, is a HUGE cognitive burden for IRV voters.
When you say that "it is actually quite common for the center to have the
lowest first-choice support and get prematurely eliminated," we need to
clarify "quite common." If you mean 5-10% of the time, then I could
believe that, but if you mean 50% of the time, then I would disagree. It
would be really interesting if a statistician could collect the data and
present results.
I can't comment on Burlington or Egypt. For the French elections, the
center candidate is generally in the top three of 10-15 candidates
(depending on the year). Candidates that came later than that top 5 have
very little support.
My main point here, however, is that, except in rare situations, voters
are not capable of voting strategically to account for a center candidate
out of the top two (and by this I mean normal voters, not the people on
this list). First, it isn't clear how often the center candidate is out of
the top two. Second, voters would need to think deeply about how the
voting system works. third, you need precise polling information. Fourth,
if you are too successful in your strategic plan, it backfires. There is
this middle ground where enough voters have to vote strategically to get
their desired result but not so many that you overshoot and still elect the
wrong candidate. A few people (like the people on this list) may consider
such a scenario when voting, but I think it is far too complicated for any
significant subset of voters to consider it.
Second, IRV requires strict ranking. That's a nontrivial cognitive burden
when there are more than a handful of candidates. If there were 15
candidates in a race, how should a voter decide exactly which of them to
give 8th preference? It's much easier to use absolute grades, as in
Majority Judgment. (Behavioural research bears this out; strict ranking is
harder than rating, for anything more than 3 or 4 options.)
This makes sense, but I don't think it matters so much. For most RCV
elections, nearly all ballots end up at one of their top 3 or 4 choices.
Rankings after this don't matter much. Also, if a person has trouble
deciding who to rank 7th and 8th, then perhaps the person doesn't have a
strong preference between them and would be equally happy (or more likely
equally unhappy) with either.
On the other hand: is the strategic burden for approval voters actually
that high? I think not. Consider the rule used by Ka-Ping Yee in his voting
system visualizations http://zesty.ca/voting/sim/: a randomly-assigned
strict threshold. This requires no strategic doublethink, yet leads to
near-ideal outcomes under his assumptions. My point is that under approval
sophisticated strategy is not nearly as important as under IRV.
Thanks for recommending this. I'll have to check this out.
But still, I think you have a point. Approval does have a cognitive
burden, and we should account for that. That's precisely why I've been
working on MAS (majority acceptable score) as an option: it's a simple
3-level voting system with an absolute minimum of cognitive burden. I
believe that under MAS, in basically all everyday voting scenarios, a naive
sincere ballot will be strategically optimal, or close enough to it that
most voters wouldn't care.
I'll check that out too
ps. You mention Condorcet, and argue that the strategic cognitive burden
is higher than IRV. I disagree; but since Condorcet comes with a higher
cognitive burden in just figuring out why a given candidate won, I agree
that Condorcet methods are probably not best for large-scale elections.
I actually wrote "Condorcet voting has the same cognitive burden as
ranked-choice voting". So we agree on this, and I also agree with your
second point.
A quick response to Ralph: I agree that approval is great and even
preferable to RCV for some things, such as informal meetings. Even for
city council though, I would prefer a ranked vote.
Ralph and Robert also made comments about the cognitive burden of
understanding how the votes were counted. That is a different topic so I
don't want to get distracted from the main point I was trying to make.
Michael, sorry, but I couldn't follow most of your comments. I'm not a
regular reader of this email list, so I don't think I have the necessary
background.
Election-Methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info
---------------------------- Original Message ----------------------------
Subject: Re: [EM] Why I prefer ranked-choice voting to approval voting
From: "Michael Ossipoff" email9648742@gmail.com
Date: Sat, October 15, 2016 2:32 pm
To: "Jeff O'Neill" jeff.oneill@opavote.com
election-methods@electorama.com
Jeff:
My reply was mostly to your justification of your lesser-evil voting.
As for IRV, it can be said more simply:
IRV was repealed in Burlington because it violated majority wishes. The
Democrat it eliminated was someone who was majority-preferred to everyone
else.
A majority consisting of Democrats & Republicans wanted the Democrat
instead of the Progressive.
That's what the Republicans thought that they were ensuring when they
ranked the Democrat in 2nd place:
which essentially punished the GOP Prog-haters for voting sincerely. �despite the (false) promise that they could vote for their favorite candidate without fear of helping elect their least favorite candidate.
...
No voting-system can guarantee that the CWs will always win.
well, if there is a CW, any Condorcet method will guarantee that the CW wins.
all of this differentiation between sincere CW and just CW is really too difficult because we cannot open people's cranium and peer inside
to see what their sincere vote is. �i think the only reasonable assumption is that, with sufficient credible assurance (that tactical voting will not help their political interest any more than sincere voting) that all ballots are sincerely marked.
But the better methods, like Approval, Score & Bucklin, gjve hir a better
chance than IRV did in Burlington.
of course, a Condorcet method will do better than any of those. �why bother with something non-Condorcet if the target is electing the CW? �i don't get it.
and direct comparisons cannot be made. �Approval collects too little data
compared to a Ranked Ballot and Score forces the voter to concoct and yield too much data. �it can only be compared if the ballot format is the same. �so different RCV methods can be direct compared. �but comparing methods with different ballots requires assumptions to be
made.
IRV gave the win elsewhere in a way that the people in Burlington rightly
perceived as arbitrary.
not "arbitrary" but incorrect.
For one thing, Approval, Score, & Bucklin allow the CWs's preferrers a
better chance to protect hir win, to not give it away.
and Ranked Pairs of Schulze allow an even better chance.
�
r b-j � � � � � � � � �rbj@audioimagination.com
"Imagination is more important than
knowledge."
�