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Comment by MichaelApproved | Hacker News Reader

Maine has "Ranked Choice Voting Initiative" (Question 5) on the ballot this election. If their citizens vote for it, they'll be able to cast first, second and third choice ballots.

In theory, that should prevent the 3rd party spoiler effect from happening while allowing them to vote their conscious.

In the last two election cycles, they split the "left" vote and allowed a far right governor to get elected.

With Ranked Choice, you get to pick your first choice. If that person didn't get enough votes, your second choice will have your vote instead.

I think they're the first one in the country to do this. I hope they enact this and we can watch the States truly be laboratories for election improvements.

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Ranked choice voting is not good enough, it has far too many flaws like not amounting to majority rule. In fact it only encourages fringe candidates who have more to gain and end up getting disproportionately represented in when voting ends

This system is used for many elections globally, and my understanding is that it's widely considered to be quite fair. I'm struggling to understand your specific objections.

I think the problem (at least theoretically) is that second-choice votes are not weighted. It could've been e.g. 1 for first choice, 0.5 for second and so on. Because obviously your second choice candidate is not as good to you as the first one, but some not-so-good candidates can get more votes. In fact I can even see some potential patterns for manipulation here.

That isn't a problem; the impact of your vote is inherent in the ranking, so lower preferences are automatically "worth less" than higher ones. I don't see a particular pattern that would allow for manipulation. AFAIK it's fairly resistant to tactical voting and manipulation by withdrawal.

Is it so in case of Maine though?

Ludicrous.

http://scorevoting.net/TarrIrv.html

And irrelevant, since IRV performs worse with 100% honest voters than Score or Approval with 100% strategic.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arrow%27s_impossibility_theore...

But there are many results showing that manipulation is NP complete. So Arrow's work is only a first take on the entire story.

http://scorevoting.net/ArrowThm.html

IRV is the worst of the five commonly discussed alternative voting methods as measured by Bayesian Regret. http://scorevoting.net/BayRegsFig.html

Score Voting and Approval Voting are simpler and better.

http://scorevoting.net/CFERlet.html http://www.electology.org/approval-voting-vs-irv

Clay Shentrup Co-founder, The Center for Election Science

Approval voting is fabulous. Why have I never seen this discussed before?

This is less of a problem if there are more than two established parties that can expect to get the vast majority of the votes. With multiple real choices, smaller parties don't have to be "fringe".

Better a diamond with a flaw than a pebble without.

It may not be perfect, but it's better than the current process.

This is on our ballot because the last two gubernatorial elections included a third party that pulled Democratic votes leading to Paul LePage becoming governor once with 38.1% oft he vote and the second time with 48.2% of the vote.

The second time wasn't too bad, but 38%?! Would have been nice to see the second pick for the folks who didn't pick the independent in the first election. Pretty sure the Dems would have carried the election with a serious majority.

Now Maine is a bit of a national embarrassment with a governor who can't go a single month without insulting someone or criticizing others for playing politics in ... wait for it ... politics.

Mainah here, ill certainly be voting for it. Im sure there are already ads circulating explaining how it will cause cancer and is wrong for Maine. Think of the children!

I can imagine a good ad for it

"If we had Ranked Choice Voting last election, we wouldn't have Paul LePage today."

The two-round French Presidential style isn't a bad idea, either. Vote for your conscience during round 1, vote defensively if you want to round 2. At least we gauge the popularity of the round 1 contenders instead of never giving them a chance for fear of splitting the vote.

It may not be a bad idea, but it's in no way better than ranked choice, and ranked choice is still incredibly simple. There wouldn't be any point to using it.

As I've commented before, the US primary system is surprisingly similar to this kind of voting, apart from requiring the voters to partition themselves by party first. The US system is the opposite of Instant Runoff Voting, effectively "agonisingly slow runoff voting" (how long is it between the primaries and the election?)

The primaries in the US, while conceptually similar, is very different because the French two round system is intended to allow other parties by letting you test the waters first.

Incidentally, I wasn't even allowed to vote for the primaries in my state since it requires me to register as a member of the party six months prior.

You can vote your conscience in round 2 only. In round 1, your best strategy is to only vote for one of the top three frontrunners, so you don't waste your vote.

And suppose your favorite frontrunner would probably lose a head to head contest with your third favorite frontrunner. Then you may want to vote for your second favorite frontrunner, to make sure she gets into the runoff and has a chance to defeat your #3.

I'd recommend Approval Voting, it has fairly good properties from the perspective of Social Choice.

For anyone wondering, like I was...

> Approval voting is a single-winner voting method used for elections. Each voter may "approve" of (i.e., select) any number of candidates. The winner is the most-approved candidate.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Approval_voting

Seems pretty similar, but simpler. Just thinking about it Id prefer something like a "Strongly Disapprove, Somewhat Disapprove, Approve, Somewhat Approve, Strongly Approve" on all candidates. Most people should be familiar with that and then you could "downvote" ones you strongly dislike, and its weighted.

The problem with that is you effectively give partisans two votes: a strong approval for their guy and a strong disapproval of your guy.

It's worth noting that there is a mathematical discipline of studying voting systems. Approval has been studied quite extensively and seems to have fewer flaws than most other methods—though it has been proven that no method can be perfect.

You're presumably talking about Arrow's Theorem, which only applies to ordinal (ranked) voting methods. http://scorevoting.net/ArrowThm

Approval voting is my favorite, too - for single-winner elections. But no single-winner voting system beats proportional representation systems [1] when it comes to electing Congress members, legislatures, councils, etc.

Everyone gets much better representation when "their candidate" can actually get a seat at the table, instead of having one party/candidate "take it all" (in that local region of theirs). It also spurs collaboration [2] and "bridge-building" rather than division and obstruction as it happens with the FPTP in the U.S. (and elsewhere)

My biggest hope is that Canada is closing-in on a proportional representation voting system, and adopts it within the next year. That could (or should) make it an election issue for 2018 and 2020 in the U.S., too.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pWPx8hmd4pQ

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vS62N5b5L7Y

This is ok if the only goal is to give a voice to all voters. But proportional representation produces all too often unworkable majorities and grand coalitions. Just look at Italy's postwar history for why pure PR is not to be recommended.

I also prefer Approval Voting (although if it were an approval vote, I would approve of both Approval Voting and Ranked Choice, heh).

One question to ask yourself to figure out which system you like better is what the outcome should be of this election:

Candidate 1 is loved by 55% of the population and despised by 45%. Candidate 2 is loved by 45% of the population and despised by 55%. Candidate 3 is tolerated by 85%.

Approval Voting would choose Candidate 3. IRV would choose Candidate 1. Who "should" be elected?

Under approval voting, wouldn't the people who love candidate 1 realize that they should vote strategically, and not approve of candidate 3 on their ballots, causing candidate 1 to win this election?

http://scorevoting.net/RVstrat6.html

The correct social welfare function is cardinal/utilitarian. Math that proves this.

http://scorevoting.net/UtilFoundns.html

So the right answer is presumably #3, although you didn't specify exact utilities so I don't know for sure.

Approval voting, because "approval" has ambiguous meaning that varies from voter to voter, is crap for most public elections. (It's good for certain kinds of votes where "approving" can be tied to some concrete meaning, generally not secret-ballot elections. E.g., if you are in a social group voting on a shared activity, where "approval" is a binding commitment to participate if the action is chosen by the group, while disapproval is an opt-out or at least a non-commit, approval makes sense.

Numerical scale rankings have similar problems (especially as there is empirical evidence that numerical rankings for similar actual levels of satisfaction are assigned differently in different cultures (e.g., ethnic) even within, say, the US. Again, there are circumstances other than usual candidate voting where the numerical scale can be tied to a concrete commitment to make the meaning of the markings consistent and such voting useful (e.g., when they are tied to an amount that one would pay to get or avoid a particular outcome), but they are generally a bad idea for electing candidates. Ranked ballots is pretty much the system that provides the most information with relatively consistent meaning from each voter for circumstances like public, secret-ballot, free elections of candidates. (Different election methods using ranked ballots do a better or worse job of using that information, of course.)

We have it just for local elections in the Twin Cities, but yeah, it's not widespread.

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