Comment on [deleted]
chunes@lemmy.world 10 months ago
Meh. There are better voting systems such as range voting and STAR.
Got some videos here that explains various voting systems if yall are interested.
First Past The Post voting (What most states use now) Videos on alternative electoral systems STAR voting Alternative vote Ranked Choice voting Range Voting Single Transferable Vote Mixed Member Proportional representation
STAR voting
Your STAR voting video doesn’t exist on my end, America here if that matters for copyright/prohibition.
France here, the video is unavailable to me too.
You also have to account in human stupidity. If you make the ballot too complex, dumbasses are gonna mess it up and the ballots will be invalidated.
The ballot is the same for all ranked voting methods. The method of determining winner from those ballots varies, and some are clearly worse.
For instance, if a candidate would beat all others 1-on-1 (Condorcet winner), then shouldn’t a decent method always select that candidate as winner? RCV doesn’t do that. Other methods also fail.
This nice table compares voting methods by a wide range of properties. I don’t think it hurts to make a more informed decision before backing a method that will be difficult to change. We got stuck with FPTP through inadequate research, and it’d be great not to repeat that mistake.
While rated voting methods fail the Condorcet winner criterion, by rating instead of ranking candidates they satisfy another set of criteria also worth considering.
Among ranked voting methods, ranked pairs seems most compelling to me.
I think that’d fail miserably in the real world.
Think about the average voter. They see this ballot:
A vs B?
A vs C?
A vs D?
B vs C?
B vs D?
C vs D?
Yea I think they’re gonna freak out upon seeing this ballot. Right now, the most important goal should be to get rid of the spoiler effect and FPTP, rather than finding the best system.
approval seems pretty good (and extremely simple).
I can see a bit of strategic voting happening.
Let me demonstrate:
For the sake of simplicity, let’s say we have 3 candidates, and no term limits:
Trump, Biden, Sanders
Biden and Sander voters dispise trump, their preference in RCV is (example):
Biden>Sanders>Trump: 30%
Sander>Biden>Trump: 25%
Trump>Sanders>Biden: 23%
Trump>Biden>Sanders: 22%
Okay, so lets say they all approve their top 2:
Biden: 77%
Sanders: 78%
Trump: 45%
Okay we have president Sanders! Congrats, right?
Well, now the trumpers who approved sanders are like: “Hey wait a minute, we made our daddy lose because we approved Sanders”
All the trumpers now have a meeting and decided that next election, they don’t approve Sanders or Biden as a strategic vote.
So now, Election 2 Results:
Biden: 55%
Sanders: 55%
Trump: 45%
Oh great, it’s a tie. The law says that the election have to be re-done to solve the tie:
Now this next election, all people who preferred Sanders first go to a Sanders supporter meeting and started saying: “Lets disapprove Biden so Bernie can win!”
Simultaneously, Biden voters will be like: “Lets disapprove Sanders so Biden can win!”
Next election results:
Trump: 45%
Biden: 30%
Sanders 25%
Congrats, we have a glorified FPTP and spoiler effect yet again!
Now, other election systems could also have strategic voting, but its less likely with, for example, RCV, since you can rank candidates.
Yea I think they’re gonna freak out upon seeing this ballot.
I think you missed the first sentence I wrote:
The ballot is the same for all ranked voting methods.
Maybe explaining what you think that means would clear up confusion?
Ok, I’m sold, let’s do this
RCV isn’t monotonic, meaning that in the right circumstances you can harm your candidate by voting for him. Doesn’t matter how rare it is; what a ridiculous quality for a voting system to have.
I agree it’s a flaw, but the answer isn’t to move to an even worse and more gameable system, it’s to move to proportional systems like MMP.
Cardinal voting systems are terrible because strategic voting is as trivial as it is in FPTP. In IRV situations where strategic voting would be possible exist, but they’re rare and hard to predict. In cardinal systems it’s always best to give the maximum score or the minimum score, and never anything in between.
And when that happens it just defaults to approval, which is still non-monotonic and better than IRV, but it’s been proven anyway that that doesn’t happen and most people are honest (or would learn to be honest after few iterations). IRV is also not devoid of strategy, as it can be better to rank your true favourite lower
I think most people would agree that it does matter how rare it is.
Even if imperfect, ranked choice voting would give voters considerably more voice than they have now. That could be used to, for example, vote in another method in the future.
The point of RCV isn’t to ensure your chosen candidate wins; it’s to ensure that whoever does win has at least some amount of approval from the majority of voters.
It does still have flaws, but it’s still far superior to the current system the US uses.
Really anything other than FPTP is fine. RCV only has the same outcome as FPTP, where the least liked candidate can win, in ~10% of outcomes. Really we should be okay with promoting most of the alternatives since they can be modified down the line as well. I personally promoting Ranked Robin, STAR, and Score more but RCV is always worth supporting if it’s on your local ballot vs FPTP. Most people are just more familiar with RCV if they have heard of some of these alternatives.
Cuberoot@lemmynsfw.com 10 months ago
There are, and my state would have banned those too it they’d heard about them when they were banning RCV. They weren’t making principled objections like monotonicity failures. They likely noticed that most of RCV’s loudest advocates were from the wrong party (and some of the were the wrong color too!), and figured that was a good enough reason to shut it down.