The mathematical challenges of voting systems is one of the reasons I've come to support multi-member districts. When only a single person can represent a jurisdiction you're always going to have people disappointed in the choice and we have have plenty of proofs that perfect voting isn't possible, so we need to aim for best reasonable compromise.
Voting is even more about identifying who didn't win than who did win. In a multi-member district a much smaller slice of the electorate 'loses', making it much easier to build broad consensus around results.
Some of the sharper edges of many ranked choice or scoring voting systems are blunted by multi-member districts. They are not winner-take-all, so small changes in expressed preference that would have changed the winner in a single member district just re-orders the winners. Specific candidates could still find themselves losing when another system would have elected them, but the electorate as a whole still ends up with representation they can tolerate.
Multi member districts does circumvent one of the assumptions of Duverger's Law, which predicts a two-party system.
But you still need to work around collusions between candidates. Candidates will be pushed to run on a slate of N candidates for N seats, and promise to support each other. Voters who want any of their positions will avoid somebody who would interfere with their own top priority. The result acts the same as a two party system, where all N candidates support the same party.
You can get some benefit by combining it with List Voting, where you go ahead and reify the party system. The party gets to send whoever it wants, proportional to the votes.That makes it harder to run multiple candidates that take all of the spots. (Not impossible: they can break into multiple virtual parties. But that's risky and coordinating votes is difficult.)
Even at that I'm not sure it really helps. Lawmaking is still fundamentally a "single member" operation: a bill either passes or it doesn't. You still get pushed to be in either the majority or minority coalition.
>Even at that I'm not sure it really helps. Lawmaking is still fundamentally a "single member" operation: a bill either passes or it doesn't. You still get pushed to be in either the majority or minority coalition.
The solution for that is to not make it a simple binary pass/fail, but to have how it passes and fails affect the outcome.
A simple and consistent way of doing this is by making it so that all laws have a built in expiration date, and how big the majority for passing the bill affects how long the law is in effect from.
A 50% + 1 margin of victory should result in the law becoming void the moment the parliament composition changes.
Perhaps a 60% margin might allow it to go for 10 years, a 70% margin for 15 years, and so on.
Constitutional changes should essentially require unanimity ( and a referendum on top of it) since they are the only permanent laws.
Some laws would be more or less "permanent" since every 30 years or so you'd like get a 99%+ majority for a "theft is illegal" type low, but other more controversial would likely be on the ballots every few years.
> But you still need to work around collusions between candidates
No, you don’t, if it’s a multimember proportional system, like STV. There are some multimember systems your concern applies to, like the “vote for N, top N win” at-large system used for some US city councils, school district boards, and similar bodies: those are simply means to have a multimember body while avoiding either diffuse or geographically-concentrated minorities from being represented. (And the prospect of that particular kind of multimember arrangement being used to neutralize the effect of black voting rights, specifically, is why multimember districts are prohibited by federal law in Congressional apportionment, currently.)
I'm really against mixed-member proportional (and pretty much all form of proportional representation) since you end up with party hacks unaccountable to voters. When parties control the order of the lists there is also really strong incentive by representatives to tow the party line to avoid relegation.
I must be not quite following your explanation...
In most of the EU, there are multi-party systems. From what I can tell, that is because of multi-member districts. Eg. The Netherlands has only one district for parliamentary elections (150 seats). There are more than 2 parties in Parliament there.
No voting method meets every criterion but two of my favourites are
- Schulze Method [0]
- Ranked Pairs [1]
The Schulze method allows for a simple ranked choice ballot, and satisfies more criteria than other RCV methods. Downside is that it is hecking complicated so it can feel like an opaque process. With distrustful electors it's a no go imo.
The Ranked Pairs method satisfies a similar number of criteria as Schulze, and meets a weaker version of later-no-harm. It's also a very intuitive method. The main downside is that the ballots become impossibly long, scaling quadratically with the number of candidates.
It's weird to me how little score/approval voting has caught on (at least here in the US) amid the push to replace FPTP. It's a lot simpler to explain than RCV, and has a lot fewer downsides overall than both RCV and FPTP.
Being vulnerable to strategic voting is a huge downside that outweighs other considerations.
As the article mentions, in the real world score voting would just be approval voting where you put a max score on some choices and 0 on others.
And in approval voting you need to think about how others will vote and pick your cutoff point based on who you think has a chance - do you vote "yes" for the center-right party to avoid the hard right party getting in? Or do you vote "no" to help the center-left party beat the center-right party? (swap those directions to personal preference)
RCV isn't perfect, but in all but the smallest elections there's really no practical strategic voting considerations. You just state your true preference order.
> Being vulnerable to strategic voting is a huge downside that outweighs other considerations.
I disagree that strategic voting as a downside outweighs the downsides of RCV or FPTP - especially when FPTP itself is susceptible to strategic voting, too. None of the three satisfy the condorcet winner criterion (that is: none of them guarantee the winner would beat every other candidate head-to-head), but it seems less likely / more contrived for score/approval voting to fail it.
> And in approval voting you need to think about how others will vote and pick your cutoff point based on who you think has a chance - do you vote "yes" for the center-right party to avoid the hard right party getting in? Or do you vote "no" to help the center-left party beat the center-right party? (swap those directions to personal preference)
That's why I'd personally go with a simple three-level score vote: "yeah", "meh", or "nah". If people really want to shoot themselves in the foot by ignoring the "meh" option, then so be it, but at least the option is there for people to vote "meh" for candidates that are merely acceptable/tolerable (and reserve "yeah" for ideal candidates and "nah" for unacceptable/intolerable candidates).
> And in approval voting you need to think about how others will vote and pick your cutoff point based on who you think has a chance
1. this is true of _every_ deterministic voting method. it's mathematically proven.
2. even approval voting is extremely accurate. see voter satisfaction efficiency calculations from harvard stats phd jameson quinn, who served with me on the board of the center for election science.
https://electionscience.github.io/vse-sim/
> RCV isn't perfect, but in all but the smallest elections there's really no practical strategic voting considerations. You just state your true preference order.
ludicrous. IRV is extremely vulnerable to strategic voting. my aunt who voted biden even tho she preferred warren (to stop trump) would do the same thing with ranking: rank biden 1st to prevent warren from losing to trump.
something similar happened in the first alaska house special election. palin was a spoiler. she caused the democrat mary peltola to win, even tho fellow republican nick begich was preferred to peltola (and to palin) by a large majority. in other words, palins supporters hurt themselves by honestly ranking palin 1st. they would have been strategically better off burying palin and ranking begich 1st.
The problem is the US is still running off best practice from 200 years ago and is famously hostile to change or copying another from other countries.
Any change is also going to disadvantage the two current parties so they will be hostile to it. Which with the hard-to-amend US constitution makes things very hard to change.
Some form of proportional representation or maybe STV in multi-member districts is actually what you'd do. Single member districts with fancy voting systems just gets you a token 3rd party representation.
Approval voting might be good but just at a human level, I think it can leave the voter feeling unsatisfied. If there is one candidate that I really like and another that I could only accept reluctantly as an alternative to someone worse then it feels bad that I need to "approve" of those two equally.
I think fundamentally it's because you have to convince the elected to pass laws that potentially undermine the way they got there, essentially asking them to kick out the ladder from underneath them. Couple that with the average person thinking that FPTP is the most fair because explaining why it isn't is counterintuitive, nothing is ever going to change.
Explaining why FPTP is unfair in the abstract is not difficult at all.
The problem is that US specifically has a political climate which can be summed up as, "the ends justify the means". While both parties still ritually extoll the importance of democracy and fairness, as soon as it's down to one particular wedge issue, winning is more important than preserving the integrity of the system.
To a large extent, this is because there's basically zero trust between differing factions - it is assumed that your political opponents will squeeze out every advantage they can out of the system when they are in power, no matter how unfair, and so when you are in power, if you don't do the same, you basically hand them victory on policy long-term. Arguably was originally Republicans who triggered this cycle during the Obama presidency, but it's hardly important now - the point is that once trust is broken, it quickly becomes a positive feedback loop.
So, getting back to electoral system, your average voter looks at those proposals to replace FPTP with RCV or whatever, and the first thing they ask is not, "is this more fair?", but rather, "how will this affect the balance of power?". And in any given constituency, the answer is that it will take power away from the current majority (or plurality) and hand it to their opposition. This is both obvious and easy to explain, so that's the usual agitprop angle, and it sells very well.
We replaced the linkbait "you" in the title with a nicely first-person phrase from the end of the article. If there's a better* title, we can change it again.
* better = more accurate and neutral, preferably using representative language from the article
My vote is 'any 1 election runoff system'[score, star, approval, ranked choice, ...]. Every 1ER is better than first past the post. It would be nice if vote nerds would shut the frak up about this one is better than that on. Open primaries; top 4 or 5 go through to the general; general uses any 1ER. Were I writing a law to put this in place, I would say we should revisit which 1ER after X number of years or Y voting cycles.
I love the promise of ranked choice voting (and other schemes). Properly implemented it seems like it could be a magic bullet to balancing some of the political divide and drawing out candidates and ideas that would satisfy more than just the extremes...
But, oh boy: we have trouble with simple plurality voting. How would you explain the outcome to people if it was implemented broadly?
> However, they might decide to vote strategically to amplify their vote — giving Desert a score of 10 while giving everything else a score of 1 would effectively make their vote stronger.
It makes more sense for the voter to give their favorite candidate a 10, their least favorite a 0, and grade every other candidate on the spectrum between their two extreme picks. So that still seems to be as informative as you could hope for.
Readit News
Voting is even more about identifying who didn't win than who did win. In a multi-member district a much smaller slice of the electorate 'loses', making it much easier to build broad consensus around results.
Some of the sharper edges of many ranked choice or scoring voting systems are blunted by multi-member districts. They are not winner-take-all, so small changes in expressed preference that would have changed the winner in a single member district just re-orders the winners. Specific candidates could still find themselves losing when another system would have elected them, but the electorate as a whole still ends up with representation they can tolerate.
But you still need to work around collusions between candidates. Candidates will be pushed to run on a slate of N candidates for N seats, and promise to support each other. Voters who want any of their positions will avoid somebody who would interfere with their own top priority. The result acts the same as a two party system, where all N candidates support the same party.
You can get some benefit by combining it with List Voting, where you go ahead and reify the party system. The party gets to send whoever it wants, proportional to the votes.That makes it harder to run multiple candidates that take all of the spots. (Not impossible: they can break into multiple virtual parties. But that's risky and coordinating votes is difficult.)
Even at that I'm not sure it really helps. Lawmaking is still fundamentally a "single member" operation: a bill either passes or it doesn't. You still get pushed to be in either the majority or minority coalition.
The solution for that is to not make it a simple binary pass/fail, but to have how it passes and fails affect the outcome.
A simple and consistent way of doing this is by making it so that all laws have a built in expiration date, and how big the majority for passing the bill affects how long the law is in effect from.
A 50% + 1 margin of victory should result in the law becoming void the moment the parliament composition changes.
Perhaps a 60% margin might allow it to go for 10 years, a 70% margin for 15 years, and so on.
Constitutional changes should essentially require unanimity ( and a referendum on top of it) since they are the only permanent laws.
Some laws would be more or less "permanent" since every 30 years or so you'd like get a 99%+ majority for a "theft is illegal" type low, but other more controversial would likely be on the ballots every few years.
No, you don’t, if it’s a multimember proportional system, like STV. There are some multimember systems your concern applies to, like the “vote for N, top N win” at-large system used for some US city councils, school district boards, and similar bodies: those are simply means to have a multimember body while avoiding either diffuse or geographically-concentrated minorities from being represented. (And the prospect of that particular kind of multimember arrangement being used to neutralize the effect of black voting rights, specifically, is why multimember districts are prohibited by federal law in Congressional apportionment, currently.)
- Schulze Method [0]
- Ranked Pairs [1]
The Schulze method allows for a simple ranked choice ballot, and satisfies more criteria than other RCV methods. Downside is that it is hecking complicated so it can feel like an opaque process. With distrustful electors it's a no go imo.
The Ranked Pairs method satisfies a similar number of criteria as Schulze, and meets a weaker version of later-no-harm. It's also a very intuitive method. The main downside is that the ballots become impossibly long, scaling quadratically with the number of candidates.
[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schulze_method
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ranked_pairs
EDIT: I was also swapped "later-no-harm" with "independence of irrelevant alternatives". I should stop writing comments before my morning coffee.
As the article mentions, in the real world score voting would just be approval voting where you put a max score on some choices and 0 on others.
And in approval voting you need to think about how others will vote and pick your cutoff point based on who you think has a chance - do you vote "yes" for the center-right party to avoid the hard right party getting in? Or do you vote "no" to help the center-left party beat the center-right party? (swap those directions to personal preference)
RCV isn't perfect, but in all but the smallest elections there's really no practical strategic voting considerations. You just state your true preference order.
Of course, I'll take any of them over FPTP.
I disagree that strategic voting as a downside outweighs the downsides of RCV or FPTP - especially when FPTP itself is susceptible to strategic voting, too. None of the three satisfy the condorcet winner criterion (that is: none of them guarantee the winner would beat every other candidate head-to-head), but it seems less likely / more contrived for score/approval voting to fail it.
> And in approval voting you need to think about how others will vote and pick your cutoff point based on who you think has a chance - do you vote "yes" for the center-right party to avoid the hard right party getting in? Or do you vote "no" to help the center-left party beat the center-right party? (swap those directions to personal preference)
That's why I'd personally go with a simple three-level score vote: "yeah", "meh", or "nah". If people really want to shoot themselves in the foot by ignoring the "meh" option, then so be it, but at least the option is there for people to vote "meh" for candidates that are merely acceptable/tolerable (and reserve "yeah" for ideal candidates and "nah" for unacceptable/intolerable candidates).
utterly false.
https://www.rangevoting.org/HonStrathttps://www.rangevoting.org/Honestyhttps://www.rangevoting.org/RVstrat6
> And in approval voting you need to think about how others will vote and pick your cutoff point based on who you think has a chance
1. this is true of _every_ deterministic voting method. it's mathematically proven.
2. even approval voting is extremely accurate. see voter satisfaction efficiency calculations from harvard stats phd jameson quinn, who served with me on the board of the center for election science. https://electionscience.github.io/vse-sim/
> RCV isn't perfect, but in all but the smallest elections there's really no practical strategic voting considerations. You just state your true preference order.
ludicrous. IRV is extremely vulnerable to strategic voting. my aunt who voted biden even tho she preferred warren (to stop trump) would do the same thing with ranking: rank biden 1st to prevent warren from losing to trump.
something similar happened in the first alaska house special election. palin was a spoiler. she caused the democrat mary peltola to win, even tho fellow republican nick begich was preferred to peltola (and to palin) by a large majority. in other words, palins supporters hurt themselves by honestly ranking palin 1st. they would have been strategically better off burying palin and ranking begich 1st.
https://rcvchangedalaska.com/
and the VSE metrics show that even 100% honest IRV performs worse than approval voting with all voters being strategic.
IRV is simply one of the worst voting methods in existence. not to mention being radically overcomplicated and opaque.
i'm sorry that you posted this before having even an inkling about how any of this works.
Any change is also going to disadvantage the two current parties so they will be hostile to it. Which with the hard-to-amend US constitution makes things very hard to change.
Some form of proportional representation or maybe STV in multi-member districts is actually what you'd do. Single member districts with fancy voting systems just gets you a token 3rd party representation.
https://rpubs.com/Jameson-Quinn/vse6
The problem is that US specifically has a political climate which can be summed up as, "the ends justify the means". While both parties still ritually extoll the importance of democracy and fairness, as soon as it's down to one particular wedge issue, winning is more important than preserving the integrity of the system.
To a large extent, this is because there's basically zero trust between differing factions - it is assumed that your political opponents will squeeze out every advantage they can out of the system when they are in power, no matter how unfair, and so when you are in power, if you don't do the same, you basically hand them victory on policy long-term. Arguably was originally Republicans who triggered this cycle during the Obama presidency, but it's hardly important now - the point is that once trust is broken, it quickly becomes a positive feedback loop.
So, getting back to electoral system, your average voter looks at those proposals to replace FPTP with RCV or whatever, and the first thing they ask is not, "is this more fair?", but rather, "how will this affect the balance of power?". And in any given constituency, the answer is that it will take power away from the current majority (or plurality) and hand it to their opposition. This is both obvious and easy to explain, so that's the usual agitprop angle, and it sells very well.
* better = more accurate and neutral, preferably using representative language from the article
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
But, oh boy: we have trouble with simple plurality voting. How would you explain the outcome to people if it was implemented broadly?
It makes more sense for the voter to give their favorite candidate a 10, their least favorite a 0, and grade every other candidate on the spectrum between their two extreme picks. So that still seems to be as informative as you could hope for.