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Comment by richforrester | Hacker News Reader

I realise this is a total straw man, but whenever I read Republicans vs Democrats I can't help but think about how utterly insane it is to have the opinions of 300 million Americans represented by TWO parties.

Two.

So Americans choose to agree with either EVERYTHING person A says, or EVERYTHING person B says.

That's what it boils down to. And it freaks me out that in a day and age where we're so educated and "free", we still think that this is a good solution.

Apologies for veering off topic. Had to get it off my chest for once, as I don't normally voice this stuff. (Because I'm sure others have said it better before.)

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This is definitely something worth pushing for, if you're an American. Figuring out how to shift our system into one where viable third parties can play ball would be frigging grand.

I'd like to see the GOP split into the 2-3 parties it shelters, and the Democrats go their 3 or so ways as well. I'd bet it'd significantly stabilize US policy and reduce the zero sum power plays that are becoming quite common.

If you want that, push for your local voting to switch to approval voting. That's the #1 thing that will enable more parties.

just found out about "approval voting" last night, so i'm experiencing baader-meinhof thanks to your comment. found out that The ACM and IEEE use this type of voting system (i think), and maybe there are some scientists out there that could start spreading the word about this form of voting.

OP's comment is the straw man, not yours.

If you go out and talk to these actual Democrats and Republicans, the bipartisan distinction seems more and more like a fraud.

Seriously, have you ever met a person who's "core driving force" is money and "all they care about"? Does that description fit about half the people your know?

Seems pretty cartoonish to me.

Cartoon of a president doesn't help USA's reputation.

> Seriously, have you ever met a person who's "core driving force" is money and "all they care about"? Does that description fit about half the people your know?

The people around me are not mega-rich. It is not a problem of that people being "bad people". It is a circumstance problem. The situation is that they have so much money that can change the laws.

Cut lobbing, redistribute wealth and you will stop this cartoon evil behavior. Keep people so rich that they don't understand what being middle class is, and they will continue pressing for ridiculous reductions on our rights.

If poor people stopped voting for the most lobbied politicians, that would stop it too. It's voters who ultimately choose, and they consistently demonstrate that they prefer lobbying - for both major parties.

Americans keep complaining about their politicians, then elect the same parties they complain about over and over again. I work with an American who explained it - she voted for a party she didn't like because she was desperate to do anything she could to prevent the other party winning. It turned out the other party won afterall so her efforts just went towards entrenching the two party system and discouraging anyone else from voting for what they actually want next time.

It's not that anyone is defending this system, it's that it is the only stable equilibrium of the winner-takes all parts of our elections.

Right, I think you have to change the dynamics. Voting ought to better capture citizens preferences, it like we vote with one hand tied behind our backs. Why can't we at least rank the candidates?

Because that would empower minor candidates. The parties that are in power aren't going to change the system in a way that disadvantages themselves and perhaps even poses an existential risk. That means if you vote democrat or republican, you're voting against your proposal. Neither party is so kind-hearted that they'll cut off the branch they're sitting on!

Too complicated.

Approval voting is much simpler than ranked-choice, and more appropriate for the general public.

My country has ranked voting. Compulsory ranked voting. No-one seems to have any difficulties with it. What's so hard to understand about rank the candidates in the order that you want them?

I did get the chance to flick through a Californian voter information guide for this last election and it seems like if your goal is to make voting simpler then looking at ballot initiatives would be far more useful.

Most of your Australian countrymen want to get rid of ranked voting.

http://scorevoting.net/WhatVotersWant

Maybe they think it's too complicated.

The mentioned discussion by Antony Green: http://blogs.abc.net.au/antonygreen/2011/02/more-australian-...

I think his points are pretty good ones. There was a lot of anger and unhappiness after the 2010 election and the role preferences played in it. I'm not going to change my mind entirely on one poll which hasn't ever been repeated when there are valid objections to the question and the signal isn't even that large. You could have polled people on if the electoral college should be gotten rid of after the last US election and you'd probably get a similar sort of polarised answer for the same reasons.

More importantly, I don't really care about what people prefer in their voting system. That probably sounds bad, and I think it's important that people trust it but it's a technical answer to the question of how we discover what people want. That's what I care about, which is why I support compulsory voting which ensures a more representative government at the cost of forcing everyone on the rolls to vote.

I'm also not some weird person who thinks we have it perfect here. Obviously optional preferential voting in all cases would be better, not just for the federal senate, and Hare-Clark nationwide would be even cooler than that. There's always improvements to be made.

The problem with approval voting is that game-theoretically it devolves to plurality voting once everyone understands the system. Approval voting violates the later-no-harm principle: indicating approval for secondary candidates can harm the chance that your primary candidate is elected. Knowing this, why would anyone approve of more than one candidate?

http://www.fairvote.org/why-approval-voting-is-unworkable-in...

Absolutely false. Strategic Plurality Voting means NOT voting for your favorite, e.g. a Green voting Democrat. With Approval Voting, that same voter's best strategy is to vote Democrat AND Green. THAT is why you'd vote for more than one candidate.

Later-no-harm is a silly "anti-criterion" that causes more harm than benefit. See explanation by a Princeton math PhD who co-founded the Center for Election Science.

http://scorevoting.net/LNH.html

He refutes similar FairVote FUD here.

http://scorevoting.net/RichieRV.html

FairVote lacks expertise and lies a lot.

https://sites.google.com/a/electology.org/www/fact-check

Here's a layman friendly talk I gave to the Colorado League of Women Voters a few years back.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2q_eMUGCU5U&t=487

Thanks for posting all this info. In the youtube video, I liked the end where you talked about an objective satisfaction measure for these systems. For someone who wants to be able to provide more preference information at the ballot, and is not married to any particular method, it does make you wonder, why not directly use the objective measure for voting? You'd get a 1-1 correspondence. Wouldn't that maximize satisfaction and the voting method objective function?

You can't use it for voting because the voting system isn't omniscient.

http://scorevoting.net/WhyNoHumans

I would think that given different peoples' standards of "approval", ranked-choice voting is much simpler for the genreal public to grasp, and a more useful metric to base an election on.

I suppose we'll see how Maine handers their newly-implemented ranked-choice scheme in the coming election cycles.

Instant Runoff Voting is actually one of the most complicated voting methods. Approval Voting is arguably the simplest.

This can be objectively measured via metrics like ballot spoilage and precinct summability.

http://scorevoting.net/Lorenzo.html

Here's a read-through of a talk I gave on this.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2q_eMUGCU5U&t=487

Ranking by preference isn't exactly hard. Most 18+ year olds can handle it.

There's empirical evidence saying otherwise.

http://scorevoting.net/Lorenzo.html

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2q_eMUGCU5U&t=487

Ah I meant not hard to vote your preferences, it can definitely be hard to understand the outcomes. I think you might be right that that's what the parent was talking about. Nice work injecting some research into this thread.

it's that it is the only stable equilibrium of the winner-takes all parts of our elections.

True, but equilibrium is not the goal. The mere fact that a political system has been around long enough to approach equilibrium means that people have been sleeping at the wheel for a long time.

In the general. But you also have to look at the primaries. For instance, this year we had 22 major candidates running for president in the two major parties. And people like Trump and Sanders show that there is plenty of room for heterodox candidates to be successful.

Primaries are part of the problem, not the solution. If I'm a member of party A, I can't voice a preference for the failed candidates of party B or A. I can only pick between the winners.

For example, I've heard from a small but non-trivial number of swing supporters that they would have voted for Sanders, but instead voted for Trump. Ranked voting might have allowed them to vote Sanders > Trump > Hillary in 2016. Others may have preferred Rand Paul, or Gary Johnson, etc.

FPTP is directly responsible for our dichotomous and increasingly unstable political system. We need more choice at the ballot box.

> For example, I've heard from a small but non-trivial number of swing supporters that they would have voted for Sanders, but instead voted for Trump.

If there's a sizeable proportion of people like that, they'd be able to get their candidate in the primary. By and large you need far fewer votes to win the primary than to win the general.

It always surprises me that there are people who don't bother to vote in the first round of voting, and then complain about the quality of candidates that made it to the second round. Well, yeah; you can't sit things out and hope that other people will pick the person you like. Only 28.5% of eligible voters voted in the presidential primary in 2016 (and non-presidential primaries often have lower turnout).

> If there's a sizeable proportion of people like that, they'd be able to get their candidate in the primary.

This was the focus of my post, though I guess it wasn't clear...

What you're suggesting doesn't work across party lines. The Democrat primaries don't care whether Republicans would have voted for Sanders over Trump, and the Republican primaries have a similar problem. Primary systems acts to amplify the passionate voices within each party at the cost of bipartisan preferences.

What everyone wants is Approval voting. Far simpler than Ranked-choice voting.

Really, do people expect the public to be able to rank their candidates?

Um… Yes? Why do you think no one would be able to do that?

Government is just one, and it represents 300 million people.

And what's the problem? Everyone wants to be a king. Government's job is to make sure no one is, with a social contract.

Except when the government effectively becomes, collectively, the king, and represents nothing more than their royal self-interest. Which is how I see things going in the USA, for all intents and purposes.

Government is always the king. That's their job.

And, in a Democracy, the self-interest of government is the public's interests.

Minor point, in a well functioning Democracy the self interest is the people. I don't think we have that right now.

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