I'm very proud of my state. We also voted to legalize marijuana.
RCV was especially relevant to Maine because our Republican governor, Paul LePage, won his seat -- twice -- with around 35%-45% of the vote, primarily due to votes being split between the Democratic and Independent candidates (a.k.a The Spoiler Effect).
To me, LePage and his path to election and re-election closely mirrors Trump and his campaign. He ran on "telling it like it is", "being a businessman, not a politician", and "draining the swamp". He has said some really horrible things about minorities and his fellow politicians, he's vetoed a record number of bills, and he's held very controversial policy stances.
The Democratic candidate came in 3rd place with only 19%. I believe that makes the Democrats the "spoiler" in that election. To not recognize it as such is to prop up the 2-party system.
While that may be true, either of the two could've been the actual winner if real ranked voting was used.
People usually flock to the candidate who has the best mix of "likely to win" and "shares my values". Preferably, only the latter should count.
It's also important to note that First-Past-The-Vote forces candidates to try to differentiate themselves as much as possible from each other, and that also includes popular 3rd parties. They will say more extreme things that they often don't really believe in. So that too would skew the results.
All in all, ranked voting will completely change how the whole process happens.
Sure, the Democrat was the spoiler there. But your characterization of kevlar1818's comment doesn't make sense.
Advocating RCV is the exact opposite of propping up the two party system. And the terminology itself is neutral -- it's only because the American democracy has suffered under (or, as some would now say, outright failed due to) the two party system that you associate "the spoiler effect" with a third party candidate.
Fair enough, but I think you're kind of splitting hairs. You're referring to the 2010 election, I think. The 2014 election has the Democratic candidate take ~43% if I'm correct.
We can debate all day about whether voting 3rd party under simple majority voting is taking a stand or being irresponsible (by causing a split vote and letting the worst candidate win). I think there are legitimate arguments on both sides.
The only real way to stop propping up a 2-party system is to switch to something like ranked choice voting, so good on them for doing it.
Fine. Whatever. Spoiler effect is much less of an issue with ranked voting, so good to know that Maine will be going IND (likely) next cycle unless GOP steps up their game and caters to the middle. A win for lefties in either way.
Just an observation here, I dont think there was an implication that the independants were a spoiler. Parent implied that democrat and independent candidates were similar in ideology and therefore a spoiler effect was present.
I'd love to start a group (or get involved with one if there is one) to bring this to my adopted state of Washington.
Though I often groan at the "laboratories of democracy" turn of phrase, it is kinda cool to see this stuff implemented somewhere. It means there's a model we can use to bring it to where we live.
Washington uses what they call Top Two. Only the top two in the primaries will be on the ballot in the general election for the congressional, state legislative and state executive offices. They can be from the same party, e.g. the two candidates for state treasurer in 2016 were both republicans.
(California does this as well and it has had interesting effects. California's 31st district voter registration favors the democratic party, but they ended up with only the choice between two republicans in the general election because there were four democratic candidates dividing up the vote in the primary.[1])
IRV confused the voters. The election administrators were dead set against it, so were only too happy to allow it to fail.
Aside, on the election integrity front, IRV is difficult to tabulate and necessitates digital tabulation. I initially supported IRV, so many years ago, but its inherit complexity finally turned me off.
I now support Approval Voting. More fair than IRV, trivial to tabulate, easy to explain.
As another Washingtonian who donated to and followed the Maine initiative closely, let me know if you find an organization to work with (or if you start one).
fairvote.org is a national organization dedicated to voting reforms such as this. They were a big supporter of Maine initiative, and often have satellite state offices.
People complain about the electoral college, that it gave the win to Trump, even though he had fewer votes. They're right, they should complain about it. However, they should also realize that in most state elections, governors across the country win elections with less than majority support, just like you mentioned. So this is not just a one time catastrophe. Far from it.
It's time to get rid of the FPTP voting system. It only serves to elect people with minority support. Heck, if the Republican party didn't use FPTP in its primary, it's likely Trump wouldn't have been the nominee. But they used it precisely because they wanted to make the primary less democratic, and they thought their main guy, Jeb Bush, would be the one winning with 40% of the Republicans' votes, while all the other candidates would split the vote. I bet they will reconsider that strategy now.
Even Clinton, which won the popular vote, only had support from 48% of the voters - less than the majority. So even if she won, in my book, it would still not be democratic, because perhaps in a two-round voting system or in an RCV system, Clinton would preserve the 48%, and Trump would get 52% if the Jill Stein, Gary Johnson, and write-in voters would've all gone to Trump. We just don't know, and the only way to know that a candidate is indeed liked by at least 50%+1 of the voters, is to have a system that shows that. The FPTP voting system doesn't.
Trump won with fewer votes than his opponent; governors always win with more votes than their opponents. Whether the governor's vote total is a majority or plurality is a separate question.
Also of interest: Democrats have won the popular vote in 6 of the last 7 presidential elections, going back a quarter century.
That will be hard, given that it won them the White House, and produced the victory for the now-defacto leader of the Republican Party.
Party rules to amend it would be a slap in the face of Trump, much like if the Democrats tried to change things so that "an Obama" couldn't win while Obama was in office.
We had record high turnout this year, when much of the country had low turnout. Perhaps because of the important ballot items such as this one. I also think Maine's splitting up our electoral votes helps, too. I say this as someone from the 2nd district who hates that Trump got our vote!
Hey, I'm also from Maine! There's at least two of us here!
I voted against the initiative, mostly because as I understand it, it still doesn't necessarily create majority candidates and because there's a good chance it's in violation of the state constitution.
While may not agree on how an alternate voting system should work, I am glad that we can finally acknowledge the system we have in place desperately needs fixing.
Thankfully, the ridiculous, unenforceable gun control initiative that was funded by out-of-state interests was also rejected. I'm very proud of my home state.
IRV is not really a good voting system. It's better than plurality, but it still doesn't really allow viable third parties. If a third party ever catches on, they could steal first votes away from a major party, and cost both of them the election. Demonstration here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Q7rzqJ0YS8
I would recommend a condorcet method, or approval voting. Condorcet methods in particular have a lot of nice mathematical properties and are close to optimal with honest voters. I think it's the most likely to allow third parties to actually get elected. You can see some results of simulated elections with different voting systems here: http://rangevoting.org/BR52002bw.pnghttp://rangevoting.org/BayRegsFig.html
They claim that just approval voting is the same level of improvement from plurality voting, as plurality voting is from monarchy. Based on the massive voter satisfaction index improvement. It really is crazy that we still use plurality voting.
As a supporter of Gary Johnson, I grew frustrated with the fear of the "spoiler effect" of our current system and spent a day looking into alternative voting systems and their pros and cons.
I, too, came away with approval voting being my favored approach.
One question to ask yourself, though, is this: in an election where candidate A is loved by 55% of the population and hated by 40%, and candidate B is loved by no one, but tolerated by 80% of the population, who "should" win? It's more of a philosophical question, but depending how you answer it influences how you should choose a voting system.
If you think the 80% tolerated candidate should win, then approval voting is for you. If you think being loved by 55% of the population should be the winner, then IRV or another system may be better.
I personally prefer the boring, centrist 80% tolerated outcome, so I like approval.
Another thing I realized, is that a lot the research doesn't seem to take into account polls ahead of time and iterated preference making. Approval voting might be terrible if it's once-and-done, but if you have polls leading up to it, you can calibrate your "approval level" a little better.
E.g., if Hitler is running, you might say "I approve of everyone else". But if you see polls suggesting that no one is approving of Hitler, then you might raise your standards a bit and not approve of some more candidates.
I find that people tend to like the voting system that (they believe) will give their favorite party the best odds. So people that have radical political ideologies, tend to prefer systems that are more likely to allow radical candidates.
Note that in practice, people start to vote tactically to prevent radical candidates, so there really isn't any voting system that works great for that purpose anyway.
I think the centrist option is probably the best for a number of reasons. I think a particularly bad president can do much more harm, than an unusually good president can do good. E.g. start WW3, or destroy the economy. Not to mention dividing the country and polarizing our political system.
Second there is a phenomenon called wisdom of crowds. That if you take the middle of the estimates given by a large number of uninformed people, it usually comes out very close to the true answer. The same should apply to voting. The middle preference of a large number of uninformed voters, should be close to optimal.
Third there are studies that show that centrists and moderates tend to have much more accurate beliefs than others. As in, their predictions of future events were the most accurate. Ideological people were extremely biased and inaccurate. That's probably the closest we can get to scientifically measuring how good their policies would be.
Lastly, for values questions, where there is no "right answer", the middle should be chosen. It's the fairest choice.
The Australian Senate uses this method. One downside is since you only need a "quota" of the vote to get elected hundreds of single issue "micro-parties" contest the senate and you end up with the so called "tablecloth ballot paper". Eg. In this article you can see 394 names on the ballot paper.
If you want viable third parties, you want multimember legislative districts with some kind of proportional representation, even if it's just STV in small (3-5 member) multimember districts, and not something drastic like Party List Proportional or MMP.
Playing around with single winner election methods may be useful for some purposes, but it's not how you really get additional viable parties.
I approve of proportional representation. But I think a good single winner method should be sufficient to elect good representatives. That is, representatives that are the best possible compromise of all the different views of voters. Which should give roughly the same results as a proportional system.
And most positions are required to be single winner, like mayors, judges, sheriffs, governors, or the president. So it makes sense to focus on single winner systems first.
I prefer more direct democracy thru elected executives vs say prime ministers or presidents of the council. Which is the best use case for Approval Voting.
But I've never experienced parliamentary government, so take this with the usual caveats.
I've considered whether it would be a good system to give voters a certain number of votes greater than 1, say 10, which they can allocate to candidates as they see fit, say 7 for candidate A, 2 for B, 1 for C. Votes would be summed for each candidate and a weighted random selection of candidate would be made.
Approval Voting makes the most sense, seeing as this concerns the election of a single individual.
Basically, vote for ALL of the candidates of whom you approve.
Whoever gets the most approval (votes) wins.
Simple.
With a paper system such as we have in the UK, then if you don't like any of the candidates you can use a blank ballot paper to record your DISapproval, with the option that if the disapproval ballots exceed the winning total of approval votes then a new election should be called with a new slate.
Mathematically, for a single candidate election, it gets extremely close to the optimum Condorcet result.
Pitting "ranked choice" versus "approval" (versus "range") voting is not really the way to think about it. Consider a "relaxed" version of ranked choice where voters are allowed to give multiple candidates the same rank. (Sometimes voters really do have no preference between two candidates.)
Approval voting then is just a "restricted" subset of "relaxed ranked choice". That is, any preference expressed in an approval voting ballot can also be expressed in a relaxed ranked choice ballot. Similarly, relaxed ranked choice voting can be considered a restricted subset of range voting. And our traditional "single choice" voting can be considered a restricted subset of all of them.
And really you should separate the mechanism for expressing voter preference from the mechanism for picking a winner. Those are separate things that, in theory, can be mixed-and-matched to produce various voting systems.
So, clearly range voting is in some sense the best (or tied for the best) ballot, in the sense that it allows the voter to express a range of preferences that is a superset of the other systems.
But there is also the issue of ballot simplicity. Some people might prefer the simpler ballots of the approval system, or even the traditional single choice system. But since those ballots have corresponding "range voting" ballots, you can deploy a "range voting" election while allowing voters to use the kind of ballot they are comfortable with.
Indeed you can imagine the idea of a "progressive ballot" in which the voter starts of with a simple "single choice" ballot, and can optionally refine their preferences with an approval ballot, then a ranked choice ballot, then, ultimately a "range" ballot.
I've actually implemented such a thing [1].
[1] http://macd.tk/pollplace - Note, this is running on an underpowered test server not intended for public use, so be gentle.
> Pitting "ranked choice" versus "approval" (versus "range") voting is not really the way to think about it. Consider a "relaxed" version of ranked choice where voters are allowed to give multiple candidates the same rank. (Sometimes voters really do have no preference between two candidates.)
I think Ranked versus Approval/Score is a proper comparison.
Ranked voting requires that you order candidates. That additional complexity is undesirable to proponents of Approval or Score Voting, such as myself.
You've suggested removing the requirement to order candidates and called it "Relaxed Ranked Voting." Removing the ordering requirement makes "Relaxed Ranked Voting" approximately equivalent to Score Voting (sometimes known as "Range Voting") [1]. The difference is that the numbers are reversed. In Score Voting with a range of 0 to 100, the highest score—that is, 100—is given the the candidate(s) you like the most. In your "Relaxed Ranked Voting," I assume the best score would be a 1. This seems needlessly confusing to the voter. Just use a scoring system that everyone is familiar with from public high school, where 100 is the best.
Relaxed Ranked Voting seems additionally complicated by each elected office on a ballot having its own bounds (a three-candidate race would presumably permit scores of 1 to 3; a five candidate race would be 1 to 5; etc.) Meanwhile, Score Voting, once adopted, would use a consistent score range for all elected offices. For example, 100 is always best.
Am I missing something else about Relaxed Ranked Voting that makes you prefer it versus Score Voting?
I find it frustrating that IRV has more momentum than Approval and Score. I am worried that we will squander an opportunity to adopt a truly superior system such as Approval or Score voting [2] if we end up with IRV. I want to get rid of Plurality as much as anyone, but replacing it with IRV seems a half-success that will temporarily exhaust regular voters' tolerance of change.
As you point out, a reason so many of us on the Approval and Score Voting hype-train talk about Approval more than Score is that it's largely compatible with existing ballots. You just mark as many as you want. Super simple. In fact, I argue that Approval voting is simpler than plurality voting because it removes the "select only one" constraint.
I've seen the data (at least from the organizations that support approval voting), and it seems to deliver the most optimum results.
However, I have some concerns. The way I see the two voting systems is like this:
Advantages approval voting:
- much simpler
- eliminates spoiler effect
- may give third-party candidates better chances in most elections
- reduces negative campaigning, since the winner would have to be "approved" by like 70% of the country in typical elections.
Disadvantages AV:
- the winner may be someone who was #2 on 80% of the country's wishlist. So 51% of country won't love the candidate, as they may with RCV or two-round voting systems, but also the other 49% won't hate the candidate (perhaps only 20% will). So from that point of view, it would be "better". But it would be someone most are just content with.
- I believe even the organizations supporting it admit that it would lead to "centrist" leaders. Perhaps in most situations a centrist is preferable, but what if the country has gone in the wrong direction for 2 decades, and it needs a completely new direction? Would a centrist still be enough? Or would the approval voting system and people pick exactly the guy that is willing to go in a different direction this one time? I'm not sure what would happen in this scenario.
Advantages RCV:
- eliminates spoiler effect
- also reduces negative campaigning, because a candidate would need some of the opponent's voters, too, to rank them as #2 on their list.
- easier transition to multi-winner RCV system for state legislature and Congress - and this alone is much bigger than just using approval voting system. Proportional representation beats all single-winner voting systems, including approval voting
Disadvantages RCV:
- it may eliminate spoiler effect, but other than that, it won't do much else to help third-parties. The main two parties would likely still be elected for a long time, at least until population's thinking about at least one of the the two parties changes in a major way
- a bit more complicated to understand how votes are counted by the average person, and a higher number of "lost" votes (I believe 5% or so, compared to about 1% or less for AV).
I believe both could also be used strategically - as in rank #1 the person you think is more likely to win with RCV, or only vote for the person that's more likely to win with AV, instead of multiple people.
So I would qualify the two as: AV would be a great improvement over FPTP, while RCV would be a moderate, but still well worth it and welcome improve, for the fact that it would eliminate spoiler effect alone. However, if single-winner RCV makes it much more likely that multi-winner RCV (STV) is also adopted for state legislature and Congress, then I would definitely choose RCV over AV, because the ultimate goal should be to adopt proportional representation in the US.
I think proportional representation coupled with a limit of $200 of individual donations and a ban on any other political donations would greatly improve democracy in the US, and these are the main changes Americans should fight for, if they want all of the other issues (as Lessig often says) to be solved as well. First fix democracy and change the system to a better one, so that the people that actually represent you get to pass laws in your favor for whatever issue you (the People) want.
> the winner may be someone who was #2 on 80% of the country's wishlist
That's an advantage, not a disadvantage.
IRV/RCV has one more critical flaw which makes the "lesser of two evils" problem worse: it completely ignores any later preferences on your ballot. If you list your preferred third-party candidate first, IRV/RCV ignores your preference for one first-party candidate over another. As long as your third-party candidate can't win, then your preference gets respected. However, when your third-party candidate reaches the tipping point, it's entirely plausible for your preferred first-party candidate to get eliminated first, followed by your preferred third-party candidate, letting your least preferred first-party candidate win.
That's quite plausible, because it's common for most voters for a particular third party to have the same preferred first-party, while first-party voters more commonly vote for only that party.
That creates an incentive for third-party voters to continue voting a first-party candidate at the top, because in IRV/RCV, only your top choice counts.
That said, hopefully it'll improve the ability to show third-party support, if not actually get third-party candidates elected.
> easier transition to multi-winner RCV system for state legislature and Congress - and this alone is much bigger than just using approval voting system. Proportional representation beats all single-winner voting systems, including approval voting
Proportional representation is not an improvement. The effect is that you end up voting for a party instead of a candidate and you end up with all the hard party line behavior seen in Europe.
But it's also not true that you can't do multi-winner voting with approval voting. It's completely trivial -- you have fifteen candidates and five seats and the five candidates with the highest approval get seats.
The problem is, that has the same issue as using RCV with multi-winner elections -- it disenfranchises people. To have multiple winners you have to combine districts. Then all the candidates get chosen by what 51% of the voters in the combined district want when before 20% of the seats could have gone to a different party because those voters had majorities in their old smaller districts. Now they get nothing and have no voice at all.
> or only vote for the person that's more likely to win with AV, instead of multiple people.
That doesn't actually help you with AV. Not approving of the candidate you most want to win buys you nothing.
The failure mode of AV, such as it is, is that it requires you to choose between approving of your second-most favorite candidate or not, when doing that could both cause that candidate to win against your favored candidate and cause them to win against your least favored candidate, and you don't know which one without knowing how everyone else voted. But that's because Arrow's Impossibility Theorem is a bear.
The biggest disadvantage is it creates horse-trading and "how to vote" cards.
The largest two parties will do deals with all the minor parties to try to gather their second preferences on their "How to vote for us" cards and mail-out advertising.
And then independent candidates don't just have to be #1, they have to beat the major parties PLUS all the other independents who traded their second preference advice to the main parties...
That ends up being why the "two-party preferred" polls (which of the two main parties are you going to rank highest) end up being far more important than the primary vote (who will you pick as your #1 preference) in Australian opinion polling.
So it is a nice idea, and I do like that Australia has it, but for single-winner elections (rather than the Aussie senate where six candidates get elected from each state-wide vote), it perhaps makes it harder not easier for independents to win.
... our City Council and the Parks and Rec department of Minneapolis are the only two governmental bodies in the US that use Single Transferable Vote to elect a multi-body chamber.
Whereas in an untruthful system like first-past-the-post - the winner could be someone who was #2 on 100% of the country's wishlist. But they voted for them because they were told their #1 had no chance.
Approval Voting also has a simple multiwinner proportional aggregation procedure:
* Each ballot is given an initial "weight" of 1.
* The votes on the ballots are summed for each candidate, thus obtaining that candidate's total score.
* The candidate with the highest total score (who has not already won) is declared a winner. (Note that the first winner is the same as the winner of an ordinary single-winner Approval Voting election using the same ballots.)
* When a voter "gets her way" in the sense that a candidate she approved of wins, her ballot weight should be reduced so that she has less influence on later choices of winners. To accomplish that, each ballot is given a new weight = 1/(1+SUM), where SUM is the sum of the scores that that ballot gives to the winners-so-far.
* Repeat until the desired number of winners has been chosen.
> Approval Voting makes the most sense, seeing as this concerns the election of a single individual
No, Approval Voting only makes any sense when approval has concrete meaning, as in a case wherected you are voting on a group activity, and voting "approve" on an alternative is also a binding commitment to participate if that option is chosen (or, conversely, voting not to approve is a binding waiver of participation.)
> Approval Voting makes the most sense, seeing as this concerns the election of a single individual.
Approval voting is probably the only system that's worse than FPTP. Under approval voting, the candidate who is the least-objectionable wins, regardless of whether voters actually prefer them to other candidates.
So, you could very easily end up with a single-issue candidate being "approved" by the vast majority and winning, even though absolutely nobody would choose them over any of the other candidates.
> Mathematically, for a single candidate election, it gets extremely close to the optimum Condorcet result.
It's misleading to refer to a Condorcet winner as the "optimum" result - the Condorcet criterion is one criterion that an election method can satisfy, but it does not guarantee the "optimum" result by any other criterion.
It's also doubly-misleading to refer to the Condorcet winner right after advocating approval voting, which does the exact opposite.
> So, you could very easily end up with a single-issue candidate being "approved" by the vast majority and winning, even though absolutely nobody would choose them over any of the other candidates.
This is true, but not necessarily a bad thing at all. Democracy is a proxy for violence to prevent violence. Someone that everyone thinks is merely okay sounds better to me than one that is liked by a third and hated and despised by a third.
> So, you could very easily end up with a single-issue candidate being "approved" by the vast majority and winning, even though absolutely nobody would choose them over any of the other candidates.
You're asking us to imagine a scenario in which there is a single issue on which one candidate's position is very popular, but despite that, no other candidate who takes that position on that issue is acceptable to as many voters. In the kind of multi-candidate race that AV is intended to encourage, that seems unlikely to me, at least if the race is one of any importance. And don't you think the other candidates are going to point out that the single-issue candidate is exactly that?
Single-issue voting is certainly a problem -- one we have already -- but I don't see that AV makes it worse; in fact I think it would help, a lot!, by allowing races in which both centrists and more extreme candidates run.
BTW I agree with you that the Condorcet criterion is overemphasized.
> Approval voting is probably the only system that's worse than FPTP. Under approval voting, the candidate who is the least-objectionable wins, regardless of whether voters actually prefer them to other candidates.
Approval Voting performs exceptionally well as measured by Bayesian Regret.
> So, you could very easily end up with a single-issue candidate being "approved" by the vast majority and winning, even though absolutely nobody would choose them over any of the other candidates.
If voters disagree about who the "other candidates" are, I don't see that as a problem.
I don't know how true that would be in the real world, but I know it would probably be the main objection to AV. That your second (or third, or fourth) preferred candidate got to win, instead of your first. Where, you, I guess is the majority here. As I'm sure the winner in any system likely isn't anywhere close to the favorite of those who lost.
For RCV, the main objection is probably that it's more complicated. Then again, Americans use stuff like electoral college, and superdelegates, and caucuses, and coin flips, to decide elections, and in comparison to all of that, the RCV system seems easy (just rank candidates in order of preference). So RCV probably has the "easy" objection between the two.
Wikipedia has a really comprehensive article [1] on this type of voting, but for most purposes of discussion this is the relevant paragraph:
"Proponents of IRV note that by reducing the spoiler effect, IRV makes it safe to vote honestly for marginal parties, and so discourages tactical voting: under a plurality system, voters who sympathize most strongly with a marginal candidate are strongly encouraged to instead vote for a more popular candidate who shares some of the same principles, since that candidate has a much greater chance of being elected and a vote for the marginal candidate will not result the marginal candidate's election."
It's generally viewed as a means of gradually stepping away from some of the problems of a two party system.
This is really exciting electoral reform. I don't think our current system captures the diversity of political opinion now, and we could really use a couple more parties. Like a democratic party that is anti establishment or a republican party which is not particularly religious but more libertarian.
And maybe if we had more parties, voters wouldn't be so tribal. There's a deep sense of "us vs them" now in America. It's good guys vs bad guys, and whatever their side says, our side cannot believe. It leads to complete nonsense like climate change denial. But if there were many parties, your 25% couldn't be against the other 75%. You'd have to recognize your perspective is just one of several and you have to look for common ground.
I found this extremely insightful, specifically Arrow's impossibility theorem [1]
It really seems like this should get more attention: Every voting system is flawed. You cannot design a voting system that will, in every possible case, be "fair."
Canada is currently consulting on alternatives to FPTP and videos like this really make me weary of Ranked Ballots/IRV over some Proportional Representation method. It seems to me that in situations like Canada, where you have multiple parties, IRV ramps up the complexity, and encourages voters to do strategic actions which may actually hurt their favoured candidate.
I use to live in Australia where they had preference with runoff and NZ has MMP (which CGP Grey also covers in the same series).
The American system is pretty terrible. Keep in mind it was never meant to be democratic. It was always symbolic. That's why we have the electoral college...just in case the government wanted to throw out the peasants suggestions. On 22 occasions in US history, electors have ignored their pledge and voted against their state's decision.
America was setup for rich property owners to vote. It wasn't until the last century minorities and women were added.
Arrow's impossibility theorem https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arrow%27s_impossibility_theore...
is often trotted out in the discussion of RCV and similar systems. It seems to me that the problem with mentioning that theorem is that if you admit that every system for judging among more than 3 choices has some flaw, and that flaw makes the system anti-democratic because it allows tactical voting, then why not admit that the status quo is worse, under the same framework, and therefore admit that something else other than plurality voting should be used?
I can't completely follow the argument, but I think Arrow's is mostly used to counter the "utopians" (roughly; people who argue that one system is Inherently Unfair(tm) and the alternative is Inherently Fair(tm)).
You're replacing one flawed system with another flawed system, so you should not argue in terms of the presence or absence of flaws, but rather argue why one is better than the other.
RCV can still have outcomes that a majority will disagree with, but it should be less common than FPTP, and also make third parties competitive in practise. That may be better than the old system (and it also may not be), but it's not going to resolve the fundamental tensions of representative democracy.
Instant runoff matches four of the postulates, including all three that FPTP matches. It is a superset of the fairness of the other, they are not "equally unfair in different ways" or anything like that.
Can someone shed some light on why we should care about the non-dictatorship requirement in Arrow's theorem? Reading the non-dictatorship section on the Stanford encyclopedia of philosophy makes it sound like it's a meaningless assumption. http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/arrows-theorem/#NonDic If someone's preferences always aligning with society's preferences results in them being a "dictator", so what?
Exactly. This is why Arrow's theorem has no applicability to practical use of voting systems in the real world. The dictatorship property is often misinterpreted.
I wish they also enacted multi-winner ranked choice voting (also called Single Transferable Vote) for legislature. Fair representation beats winner-takes-all systems every time, because it guarantees more than just two parties get to be in charge, much like in parliamentary systems (which also use some kind of fair/proportional representation voting system). But it's still a good start, and maybe other states will take a look at both, and choose a better system next time.
By the way, this is exactly the sort of thing Sam Altman should be fighting for, along with joining Wolf-Pac, Represent.Us, and others to get money out of politics. Not try to use GOTV tactics to get people to vote for his preferred candidate. That is, if Altman still cares about this, and the "improve democracy thing" he pushed for earlier wasn't just a one time ruse to get people to vote for Clinton.
If Altman is serious about improving democracy, these right here are by far the best ways to do it - way better than just trying to "increase turnout" in an election. Because for one, fair representation voting systems increase turnouts by default, because people feel better represented and have more reasons to go out and vote, and second, STV also eliminates gerrymandering, which would also greatly improve democracy by making seats less safe.
Ireland currently uses a PR-STV system, and if you ask any Irish person about their politicians, you will probably get an ear-full.
STV pushes majors parties to sit on the political middle, where they might not collect as many '1's', but will collect a lot of 2s,3s,4s, etc, as more divisive parties/candidates will be ranked highly by a segment of the population but very lowly by the rest.
I'm not really stuck on STV, per se. Whatever proportional voting system the US chooses is fine by me. However, I think that if RCV is adopted, STV would be a natural extension to that. Plus, something like STV (or Dion's P3, which I actually like a bit more: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wyLeClCrfgQ) is more likely to be adopted in the US, than say something like list-based voting, because Americans like to directly elect candidates from their districts.
But I do think STV is still far preferable to winner-take-all FPTP, where the winner may only represent 35-40% of the voters in a given district, or even RCV, where the winner may represent 50%+1 to ~55% of the voters in a district, which is obviously better, but it's still less preferable to being 3-5 winners in a larger district and from 3-5 parties, whereas RCV would still mostly allow the two main parties to rule, with some exceptions in a few districts.
Readit News
RCV was especially relevant to Maine because our Republican governor, Paul LePage, won his seat -- twice -- with around 35%-45% of the vote, primarily due to votes being split between the Democratic and Independent candidates (a.k.a The Spoiler Effect).
To me, LePage and his path to election and re-election closely mirrors Trump and his campaign. He ran on "telling it like it is", "being a businessman, not a politician", and "draining the swamp". He has said some really horrible things about minorities and his fellow politicians, he's vetoed a record number of bills, and he's held very controversial policy stances.
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/08/30/us/controversial-gov-paul-...
http://www.slate.com/blogs/browbeat/2016/10/06/samantha_bee_...
Edit: I never meant to imply blame of any candidate in creating the Spoiler Effect, and as such I modified my comment to reflect this.
People usually flock to the candidate who has the best mix of "likely to win" and "shares my values". Preferably, only the latter should count.
It's also important to note that First-Past-The-Vote forces candidates to try to differentiate themselves as much as possible from each other, and that also includes popular 3rd parties. They will say more extreme things that they often don't really believe in. So that too would skew the results.
All in all, ranked voting will completely change how the whole process happens.
Advocating RCV is the exact opposite of propping up the two party system. And the terminology itself is neutral -- it's only because the American democracy has suffered under (or, as some would now say, outright failed due to) the two party system that you associate "the spoiler effect" with a third party candidate.
The only real way to stop propping up a 2-party system is to switch to something like ranked choice voting, so good on them for doing it.
I'd love to start a group (or get involved with one if there is one) to bring this to my adopted state of Washington.
Though I often groan at the "laboratories of democracy" turn of phrase, it is kinda cool to see this stuff implemented somewhere. It means there's a model we can use to bring it to where we live.
(California does this as well and it has had interesting effects. California's 31st district voter registration favors the democratic party, but they ended up with only the choice between two republicans in the general election because there were four democratic candidates dividing up the vote in the primary.[1])
1. https://ballotpedia.org/California's_31st_Congressional_Dist...
IRV confused the voters. The election administrators were dead set against it, so were only too happy to allow it to fail.
Aside, on the election integrity front, IRV is difficult to tabulate and necessitates digital tabulation. I initially supported IRV, so many years ago, but its inherit complexity finally turned me off.
I now support Approval Voting. More fair than IRV, trivial to tabulate, easy to explain.
I'd be happy to volunteer, donate, etc.
It's time to get rid of the FPTP voting system. It only serves to elect people with minority support. Heck, if the Republican party didn't use FPTP in its primary, it's likely Trump wouldn't have been the nominee. But they used it precisely because they wanted to make the primary less democratic, and they thought their main guy, Jeb Bush, would be the one winning with 40% of the Republicans' votes, while all the other candidates would split the vote. I bet they will reconsider that strategy now.
Even Clinton, which won the popular vote, only had support from 48% of the voters - less than the majority. So even if she won, in my book, it would still not be democratic, because perhaps in a two-round voting system or in an RCV system, Clinton would preserve the 48%, and Trump would get 52% if the Jill Stein, Gary Johnson, and write-in voters would've all gone to Trump. We just don't know, and the only way to know that a candidate is indeed liked by at least 50%+1 of the voters, is to have a system that shows that. The FPTP voting system doesn't.
Also of interest: Democrats have won the popular vote in 6 of the last 7 presidential elections, going back a quarter century.
That will be hard, given that it won them the White House, and produced the victory for the now-defacto leader of the Republican Party.
Party rules to amend it would be a slap in the face of Trump, much like if the Democrats tried to change things so that "an Obama" couldn't win while Obama was in office.
We had record high turnout this year, when much of the country had low turnout. Perhaps because of the important ballot items such as this one. I also think Maine's splitting up our electoral votes helps, too. I say this as someone from the 2nd district who hates that Trump got our vote!
I voted against the initiative, mostly because as I understand it, it still doesn't necessarily create majority candidates and because there's a good chance it's in violation of the state constitution.
I don't mind that it passed though.
How could it not? Genuinely asking.
That applies to all of us.
Dead Comment
IRV is not really a good voting system. It's better than plurality, but it still doesn't really allow viable third parties. If a third party ever catches on, they could steal first votes away from a major party, and cost both of them the election. Demonstration here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Q7rzqJ0YS8
I would recommend a condorcet method, or approval voting. Condorcet methods in particular have a lot of nice mathematical properties and are close to optimal with honest voters. I think it's the most likely to allow third parties to actually get elected. You can see some results of simulated elections with different voting systems here: http://rangevoting.org/BR52002bw.png http://rangevoting.org/BayRegsFig.html
They claim that just approval voting is the same level of improvement from plurality voting, as plurality voting is from monarchy. Based on the massive voter satisfaction index improvement. It really is crazy that we still use plurality voting.
I, too, came away with approval voting being my favored approach.
One question to ask yourself, though, is this: in an election where candidate A is loved by 55% of the population and hated by 40%, and candidate B is loved by no one, but tolerated by 80% of the population, who "should" win? It's more of a philosophical question, but depending how you answer it influences how you should choose a voting system.
If you think the 80% tolerated candidate should win, then approval voting is for you. If you think being loved by 55% of the population should be the winner, then IRV or another system may be better.
I personally prefer the boring, centrist 80% tolerated outcome, so I like approval.
Another thing I realized, is that a lot the research doesn't seem to take into account polls ahead of time and iterated preference making. Approval voting might be terrible if it's once-and-done, but if you have polls leading up to it, you can calibrate your "approval level" a little better.
E.g., if Hitler is running, you might say "I approve of everyone else". But if you see polls suggesting that no one is approving of Hitler, then you might raise your standards a bit and not approve of some more candidates.
Note that in practice, people start to vote tactically to prevent radical candidates, so there really isn't any voting system that works great for that purpose anyway.
I think the centrist option is probably the best for a number of reasons. I think a particularly bad president can do much more harm, than an unusually good president can do good. E.g. start WW3, or destroy the economy. Not to mention dividing the country and polarizing our political system.
Second there is a phenomenon called wisdom of crowds. That if you take the middle of the estimates given by a large number of uninformed people, it usually comes out very close to the true answer. The same should apply to voting. The middle preference of a large number of uninformed voters, should be close to optimal.
Third there are studies that show that centrists and moderates tend to have much more accurate beliefs than others. As in, their predictions of future events were the most accurate. Ideological people were extremely biased and inaccurate. That's probably the closest we can get to scientifically measuring how good their policies would be.
Lastly, for values questions, where there is no "right answer", the middle should be chosen. It's the fairest choice.
http://www.dailytelegraph.com.au/news/nsw-state-election-201...
I'd expect Approval Voting to have the same property.
Playing around with single winner election methods may be useful for some purposes, but it's not how you really get additional viable parties.
And most positions are required to be single winner, like mayors, judges, sheriffs, governors, or the president. So it makes sense to focus on single winner systems first.
I prefer more direct democracy thru elected executives vs say prime ministers or presidents of the council. Which is the best use case for Approval Voting.
But I've never experienced parliamentary government, so take this with the usual caveats.
Basically, vote for ALL of the candidates of whom you approve.
Whoever gets the most approval (votes) wins.
Simple.
With a paper system such as we have in the UK, then if you don't like any of the candidates you can use a blank ballot paper to record your DISapproval, with the option that if the disapproval ballots exceed the winning total of approval votes then a new election should be called with a new slate.
Mathematically, for a single candidate election, it gets extremely close to the optimum Condorcet result.
Approval voting then is just a "restricted" subset of "relaxed ranked choice". That is, any preference expressed in an approval voting ballot can also be expressed in a relaxed ranked choice ballot. Similarly, relaxed ranked choice voting can be considered a restricted subset of range voting. And our traditional "single choice" voting can be considered a restricted subset of all of them.
And really you should separate the mechanism for expressing voter preference from the mechanism for picking a winner. Those are separate things that, in theory, can be mixed-and-matched to produce various voting systems.
So, clearly range voting is in some sense the best (or tied for the best) ballot, in the sense that it allows the voter to express a range of preferences that is a superset of the other systems.
But there is also the issue of ballot simplicity. Some people might prefer the simpler ballots of the approval system, or even the traditional single choice system. But since those ballots have corresponding "range voting" ballots, you can deploy a "range voting" election while allowing voters to use the kind of ballot they are comfortable with.
Indeed you can imagine the idea of a "progressive ballot" in which the voter starts of with a simple "single choice" ballot, and can optionally refine their preferences with an approval ballot, then a ranked choice ballot, then, ultimately a "range" ballot.
I've actually implemented such a thing [1].
[1] http://macd.tk/pollplace - Note, this is running on an underpowered test server not intended for public use, so be gentle.
Thank you for highlighting that. Too often the ballot and the aggregation method are conflated.
On https://modernballots.com/elections/zombies/vote/ I implemented 5-star ratings as the default. Everyone's familiar with this kind of rating and it allows indifference between two options.
Deleted Comment
I think Ranked versus Approval/Score is a proper comparison.
Ranked voting requires that you order candidates. That additional complexity is undesirable to proponents of Approval or Score Voting, such as myself.
You've suggested removing the requirement to order candidates and called it "Relaxed Ranked Voting." Removing the ordering requirement makes "Relaxed Ranked Voting" approximately equivalent to Score Voting (sometimes known as "Range Voting") [1]. The difference is that the numbers are reversed. In Score Voting with a range of 0 to 100, the highest score—that is, 100—is given the the candidate(s) you like the most. In your "Relaxed Ranked Voting," I assume the best score would be a 1. This seems needlessly confusing to the voter. Just use a scoring system that everyone is familiar with from public high school, where 100 is the best.
Relaxed Ranked Voting seems additionally complicated by each elected office on a ballot having its own bounds (a three-candidate race would presumably permit scores of 1 to 3; a five candidate race would be 1 to 5; etc.) Meanwhile, Score Voting, once adopted, would use a consistent score range for all elected offices. For example, 100 is always best.
Am I missing something else about Relaxed Ranked Voting that makes you prefer it versus Score Voting?
I find it frustrating that IRV has more momentum than Approval and Score. I am worried that we will squander an opportunity to adopt a truly superior system such as Approval or Score voting [2] if we end up with IRV. I want to get rid of Plurality as much as anyone, but replacing it with IRV seems a half-success that will temporarily exhaust regular voters' tolerance of change.
As you point out, a reason so many of us on the Approval and Score Voting hype-train talk about Approval more than Score is that it's largely compatible with existing ballots. You just mark as many as you want. Super simple. In fact, I argue that Approval voting is simpler than plurality voting because it removes the "select only one" constraint.
[1] https://electology.org/score-voting
[2] https://electology.org/approval-voting-versus-irv
However, I have some concerns. The way I see the two voting systems is like this:
Advantages approval voting:
- much simpler
- eliminates spoiler effect
- may give third-party candidates better chances in most elections
- reduces negative campaigning, since the winner would have to be "approved" by like 70% of the country in typical elections.
Disadvantages AV:
- the winner may be someone who was #2 on 80% of the country's wishlist. So 51% of country won't love the candidate, as they may with RCV or two-round voting systems, but also the other 49% won't hate the candidate (perhaps only 20% will). So from that point of view, it would be "better". But it would be someone most are just content with.
- I believe even the organizations supporting it admit that it would lead to "centrist" leaders. Perhaps in most situations a centrist is preferable, but what if the country has gone in the wrong direction for 2 decades, and it needs a completely new direction? Would a centrist still be enough? Or would the approval voting system and people pick exactly the guy that is willing to go in a different direction this one time? I'm not sure what would happen in this scenario.
Advantages RCV:
- eliminates spoiler effect
- also reduces negative campaigning, because a candidate would need some of the opponent's voters, too, to rank them as #2 on their list.
- easier transition to multi-winner RCV system for state legislature and Congress - and this alone is much bigger than just using approval voting system. Proportional representation beats all single-winner voting systems, including approval voting
Disadvantages RCV:
- it may eliminate spoiler effect, but other than that, it won't do much else to help third-parties. The main two parties would likely still be elected for a long time, at least until population's thinking about at least one of the the two parties changes in a major way - a bit more complicated to understand how votes are counted by the average person, and a higher number of "lost" votes (I believe 5% or so, compared to about 1% or less for AV).
I believe both could also be used strategically - as in rank #1 the person you think is more likely to win with RCV, or only vote for the person that's more likely to win with AV, instead of multiple people.
So I would qualify the two as: AV would be a great improvement over FPTP, while RCV would be a moderate, but still well worth it and welcome improve, for the fact that it would eliminate spoiler effect alone. However, if single-winner RCV makes it much more likely that multi-winner RCV (STV) is also adopted for state legislature and Congress, then I would definitely choose RCV over AV, because the ultimate goal should be to adopt proportional representation in the US.
I think proportional representation coupled with a limit of $200 of individual donations and a ban on any other political donations would greatly improve democracy in the US, and these are the main changes Americans should fight for, if they want all of the other issues (as Lessig often says) to be solved as well. First fix democracy and change the system to a better one, so that the people that actually represent you get to pass laws in your favor for whatever issue you (the People) want.
That's an advantage, not a disadvantage.
IRV/RCV has one more critical flaw which makes the "lesser of two evils" problem worse: it completely ignores any later preferences on your ballot. If you list your preferred third-party candidate first, IRV/RCV ignores your preference for one first-party candidate over another. As long as your third-party candidate can't win, then your preference gets respected. However, when your third-party candidate reaches the tipping point, it's entirely plausible for your preferred first-party candidate to get eliminated first, followed by your preferred third-party candidate, letting your least preferred first-party candidate win.
That's quite plausible, because it's common for most voters for a particular third party to have the same preferred first-party, while first-party voters more commonly vote for only that party.
That creates an incentive for third-party voters to continue voting a first-party candidate at the top, because in IRV/RCV, only your top choice counts.
That said, hopefully it'll improve the ability to show third-party support, if not actually get third-party candidates elected.
https://youtube.com/watch?v=JtKAScORevQ
Score Voting and Approval Voting are simpler and better.
http://scorevoting.net/CFERlet.html http://www.electology.org/approval-voting-vs-irv
Proportional representation is not an improvement. The effect is that you end up voting for a party instead of a candidate and you end up with all the hard party line behavior seen in Europe.
But it's also not true that you can't do multi-winner voting with approval voting. It's completely trivial -- you have fifteen candidates and five seats and the five candidates with the highest approval get seats.
The problem is, that has the same issue as using RCV with multi-winner elections -- it disenfranchises people. To have multiple winners you have to combine districts. Then all the candidates get chosen by what 51% of the voters in the combined district want when before 20% of the seats could have gone to a different party because those voters had majorities in their old smaller districts. Now they get nothing and have no voice at all.
> or only vote for the person that's more likely to win with AV, instead of multiple people.
That doesn't actually help you with AV. Not approving of the candidate you most want to win buys you nothing.
The failure mode of AV, such as it is, is that it requires you to choose between approving of your second-most favorite candidate or not, when doing that could both cause that candidate to win against your favored candidate and cause them to win against your least favored candidate, and you don't know which one without knowing how everyone else voted. But that's because Arrow's Impossibility Theorem is a bear.
The largest two parties will do deals with all the minor parties to try to gather their second preferences on their "How to vote for us" cards and mail-out advertising.
And then independent candidates don't just have to be #1, they have to beat the major parties PLUS all the other independents who traded their second preference advice to the main parties...
That ends up being why the "two-party preferred" polls (which of the two main parties are you going to rank highest) end up being far more important than the primary vote (who will you pick as your #1 preference) in Australian opinion polling.
So it is a nice idea, and I do like that Australia has it, but for single-winner elections (rather than the Aussie senate where six candidates get elected from each state-wide vote), it perhaps makes it harder not easier for independents to win.
Woo hoo, represent Cambridge, Mass.
... our City Council and the Parks and Rec department of Minneapolis are the only two governmental bodies in the US that use Single Transferable Vote to elect a multi-body chamber.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_and_use_of_the_single_...
* Each ballot is given an initial "weight" of 1.
* The votes on the ballots are summed for each candidate, thus obtaining that candidate's total score.
* The candidate with the highest total score (who has not already won) is declared a winner. (Note that the first winner is the same as the winner of an ordinary single-winner Approval Voting election using the same ballots.)
* When a voter "gets her way" in the sense that a candidate she approved of wins, her ballot weight should be reduced so that she has less influence on later choices of winners. To accomplish that, each ballot is given a new weight = 1/(1+SUM), where SUM is the sum of the scores that that ballot gives to the winners-so-far.
* Repeat until the desired number of winners has been chosen.
(paraphrased from http://rangevoting.org/RRV.html )
No, Approval Voting only makes any sense when approval has concrete meaning, as in a case wherected you are voting on a group activity, and voting "approve" on an alternative is also a binding commitment to participate if that option is chosen (or, conversely, voting not to approve is a binding waiver of participation.)
Approval voting is probably the only system that's worse than FPTP. Under approval voting, the candidate who is the least-objectionable wins, regardless of whether voters actually prefer them to other candidates.
So, you could very easily end up with a single-issue candidate being "approved" by the vast majority and winning, even though absolutely nobody would choose them over any of the other candidates.
> Mathematically, for a single candidate election, it gets extremely close to the optimum Condorcet result.
It's misleading to refer to a Condorcet winner as the "optimum" result - the Condorcet criterion is one criterion that an election method can satisfy, but it does not guarantee the "optimum" result by any other criterion.
It's also doubly-misleading to refer to the Condorcet winner right after advocating approval voting, which does the exact opposite.
This is true, but not necessarily a bad thing at all. Democracy is a proxy for violence to prevent violence. Someone that everyone thinks is merely okay sounds better to me than one that is liked by a third and hated and despised by a third.
You're asking us to imagine a scenario in which there is a single issue on which one candidate's position is very popular, but despite that, no other candidate who takes that position on that issue is acceptable to as many voters. In the kind of multi-candidate race that AV is intended to encourage, that seems unlikely to me, at least if the race is one of any importance. And don't you think the other candidates are going to point out that the single-issue candidate is exactly that?
Single-issue voting is certainly a problem -- one we have already -- but I don't see that AV makes it worse; in fact I think it would help, a lot!, by allowing races in which both centrists and more extreme candidates run.
BTW I agree with you that the Condorcet criterion is overemphasized.
Approval Voting performs exceptionally well as measured by Bayesian Regret.
http://scorevoting.net/BayRegsFig.html
There's also a theorem that it elects beats all winners given plausible models of voter strategy.
http://scorevoting.net/AppCW.html
Clay Shentrup Cofounder, The Center for Election Science
If voters disagree about who the "other candidates" are, I don't see that as a problem.
For RCV, the main objection is probably that it's more complicated. Then again, Americans use stuff like electoral college, and superdelegates, and caucuses, and coin flips, to decide elections, and in comparison to all of that, the RCV system seems easy (just rank candidates in order of preference). So RCV probably has the "easy" objection between the two.
"Proponents of IRV note that by reducing the spoiler effect, IRV makes it safe to vote honestly for marginal parties, and so discourages tactical voting: under a plurality system, voters who sympathize most strongly with a marginal candidate are strongly encouraged to instead vote for a more popular candidate who shares some of the same principles, since that candidate has a much greater chance of being elected and a vote for the marginal candidate will not result the marginal candidate's election."
It's generally viewed as a means of gradually stepping away from some of the problems of a two party system.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Instant-runoff_voting
And maybe if we had more parties, voters wouldn't be so tribal. There's a deep sense of "us vs them" now in America. It's good guys vs bad guys, and whatever their side says, our side cannot believe. It leads to complete nonsense like climate change denial. But if there were many parties, your 25% couldn't be against the other 75%. You'd have to recognize your perspective is just one of several and you have to look for common ground.
It really seems like this should get more attention: Every voting system is flawed. You cannot design a voting system that will, in every possible case, be "fair."
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arrow%27s_impossibility_theore...
The American system is pretty terrible. Keep in mind it was never meant to be democratic. It was always symbolic. That's why we have the electoral college...just in case the government wanted to throw out the peasants suggestions. On 22 occasions in US history, electors have ignored their pledge and voted against their state's decision.
America was setup for rich property owners to vote. It wasn't until the last century minorities and women were added.
You're replacing one flawed system with another flawed system, so you should not argue in terms of the presence or absence of flaws, but rather argue why one is better than the other.
RCV can still have outcomes that a majority will disagree with, but it should be less common than FPTP, and also make third parties competitive in practise. That may be better than the old system (and it also may not be), but it's not going to resolve the fundamental tensions of representative democracy.
By the way, this is exactly the sort of thing Sam Altman should be fighting for, along with joining Wolf-Pac, Represent.Us, and others to get money out of politics. Not try to use GOTV tactics to get people to vote for his preferred candidate. That is, if Altman still cares about this, and the "improve democracy thing" he pushed for earlier wasn't just a one time ruse to get people to vote for Clinton.
If Altman is serious about improving democracy, these right here are by far the best ways to do it - way better than just trying to "increase turnout" in an election. Because for one, fair representation voting systems increase turnouts by default, because people feel better represented and have more reasons to go out and vote, and second, STV also eliminates gerrymandering, which would also greatly improve democracy by making seats less safe.
http://www.wolf-pac.com/
https://represent.us/
STV by CGP Grey: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l8XOZJkozfI
Droop method for STV is probably preferable: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wRc630BSTIg
Also preferred by FairVote:
http://www.fairvote.org/fair_representation#what_is_fair_vot...
STV pushes majors parties to sit on the political middle, where they might not collect as many '1's', but will collect a lot of 2s,3s,4s, etc, as more divisive parties/candidates will be ranked highly by a segment of the population but very lowly by the rest.
But I do think STV is still far preferable to winner-take-all FPTP, where the winner may only represent 35-40% of the voters in a given district, or even RCV, where the winner may represent 50%+1 to ~55% of the voters in a district, which is obviously better, but it's still less preferable to being 3-5 winners in a larger district and from 3-5 parties, whereas RCV would still mostly allow the two main parties to rule, with some exceptions in a few districts.