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Comment by sickbeard | Hacker News Reader

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

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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".

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

Better a diamond with a flaw than a pebble without.

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