Hacker News Reader

Comment by thomasfoster96 | Hacker News Reader

Wikipedia has a great comparison of voting systems: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voting_system#Compliance_of_se...

In my opinion the best system for US presidential elections would either be a nationwide instant-runoff election or (if the electoral college couldn’t be replaced) a state-by-state single transferable vote election that proportionally elected Electoral College electors.

An instant runoff election would let voters put Johnson or Stein as their first preference and put Clinton or Trump as their second or third preference. It completely eliminates the problem of spoilers. The counting of votes might take a bit longer (perhaps a day or two if done manually), but needing to know the result within a matter of hours isn’t a requirement.

View on HN

Instant runoff voting DOES NOT eliminate the problem of spoilers, see "Squeezed Out" at http://zesty.ca/voting/sim/

Approval voting is easy to explain and does not have theoretical problems of instant runoff voting. In approval voting, voters answer YES/NO for all candidates. Candidates with most YES win.

I'm not sure what your point is - that website seems to be measuring candidates on a political spectrum as well, and all it shows is that a two party system will emerge.

Approval voting suffers from most of the same problems as plurality voting - a candidate can still be elected despite not being approved or preferred by a majority.

The problem with Instant Runoff is called "Favourite Betrayal", where placing a party second can lead to them being eliminated before your vote for them can be counted.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JtKAScORevQ

>a candidate can still be elected despite not being approved or preferred by a majority.

Only if there are no candidates preferred by a majority, in which case no voting system can produce a result people are happy with. The only way a ranked system could avoid this is by forcing people to choose between options they hate, and calling that a majority, which doesn't seem much better than letting someone with 30% approval win because it was the most. In fact, there's no reason you couldn't add a majority victory criterion to approval voting.

I used to support instant runoff voting. In fact, I voted to change the UK voting method to instant runoff in the 2011 UK Referendum.

However, I've become less enamoured with it. People don't understand it. It's used in London for the mayoral election, and people just get confused - they'll tell me they are putting the same party as their first AND second choice.

In fact, judging from the mayoral election, it wouldn't change much - the two main parties still end up getting the lion share of the first round of voting, which implies that the vast majority of people are loyal to those parties (a bit like football teams) and aren't voting for them out of tactical necessity.

I'd still go for instant runoff in a heartbeat, but it's not the panacea I thought it was.

I’d agree that it’s not a panacea - but with all voting systems other than “whoever gets the most votes wins” there will be some confusion.

There is a well known phenomenon in Australia where voters in Tasmania will use preferences more often than voters in mainland states (Australia’s Senate uses STV with semi-optional preferences). This is almost certainly because Tasmania uses the same system in other elections, so voters are used to it and know how to use preferences.

The Schulze method would probably appeal to HN readers, and it has a bunch of advantages. (Vote tabulation by digraph.) Good luck explaining it to laymen, though.

It does get a bit out of hand if you have a large number of candidates (or options).

Reply on news.ycombinator.com