Hacker News Reader

Comment by clarkevans | Hacker News Reader

This algorithmic instability isn't merely of academic interest, it was encountered in the 2009 election for Burlington's mayor [0]. Note that IRV advocates don't see this sort of discontinuity to be a problem [1]. Perhaps we need something like Star Voting [2], which seems to be an improvement over range [3] or approval [4] voting. Star Voting is rather new and could use analysis, like Ka-Ping Yee's and Nicky Case's efforts.

[0] https://bolson.org/~bolson/2009/20090303_burlington_vt_mayor...

[1] http://www.fairvote.org/why-the-condorcet-criterion-is-less-...

[2] https://www.starvoting.us/

[3] https://rangevoting.org/

[4] https://www.electionscience.org/library/approval-voting/

View on HN

I always recommend this pair of videos when discussing STAR voting vs other alternative systems. The first video is an easy-to-follow explanation of how spoiler effects can happen in both plurality voting and IRV [1]. In the second [2], the guy who created Star voting applies Ka-Ping Yee's methods to Star voting and animates it side-by-side with alternative systems to show its performance.

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

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-4FXLQoLDBA

Interesting, this must be relatively new. They introduce a slight modification to IRV that mitigates its artifacts. But you can see even in the video that some remain.

I'm not sure if or why people might feel more satisfied casting their votes as a partial ranking versus as a binary approval. But it seems like STAR works great for the former group, approval for the latter.

Star voting (along with Borda) introduces intensity of preference, which introduces extra concern when we're talking about democratic elections.

For instance - in a 99-voter election, say that 50 voters prefer A, and 49 prefer B. But the A supporters are lukewarm in their support, while B supporters are really passionate. Who should win? For democratic elections, that answer always needs to be A.

STAR has a 2-phase mechanism. The 1st phase, by intensity, is used to determine the finalists. In the 2nd phase -- the actual vote -- it is one person one vote, regardless of intensity. By your example, STAR poses no problem -- both A & B would be the finalists by intensity. Then, A would be chosen by majority. Anyway, it's examples like this that could use some analysis & help visualization.

addendum: if a candidate has broad, but shallow support, they'd not make it in FPTP nor in RCV. Even so, it'd be great if we could have visualization tools /w STAR voting included so that we could point to specific examples and have fun arguments about them. Perhaps there are some very weird discontinuities in STAR voting as well.

Yeah, I know, but is it possible for a candidate with broad shallow support to be boxed out of the top two? There's no pure reason to have a cutoff point there, it's arbitrary.

Was going to say exactly this. STAR is basically approval with the added metric of approval amount, which I personally think is important, and has the benefit of being similar to something people already understand (star ratings for products/services).

I feel logically the amount would just be embedded in people's vote of approval. Since score is the average anyways. Most people would probably approve of all 3+ amount, and won't approve of who they would have scored 3 or less.

It gets weird making the 0s and 5s, and the 1s and 4s fight I feel. Since those are just ultra polarized candidates.

It depends what we want to optimize for, but I think most people would agree that we want to avoid having a very large number of absolutely discontent voters. So I think a system which either makes the least hated candidate win (even if no ones favorite), or makes an overwhelming favorite win, is what we'd want. That way we minimize the number of people who are absolutely disgruntled.

> It depends what we want to optimize for, but I think most people would agree that we want to avoid having a very large number of absolutely discontent voters. So I think a system which either makes the least hated candidate win (even if no ones favorite), or makes an overwhelming favorite win, is what we'd want. That way we minimize the number of people who are absolutely disgruntled.

If the least hated candidate wins, I worry that they would lack the mandate to get anything done. I'm not sure if that's a good thing or a bad thing.

I'm not sure why that would be the case. Why would they face any more opposition than any other candidate being elected would to put in place their electoral promesses?

In fact, I'd expect less opposition, since more people approved of their proposed platform.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com