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Comment by catern | Hacker News Reader

The really unfortunate thing about NYC's ranked choice voting is that you're limited to ranking only 5 candidates. This means you still need to engage in tactical voting.

You can't just rank the candidates you like, in the order you like them, because your genuine top 5 choices might not include the people who are most likely to win. You'll be "throwing your vote away" unless you include the most-likely-to-win candidates - that is, unless you vote tactically.

I've seen lots of discussion in NYC where people are trying to figure out the right tactical voting to do given their views and given the fact that they can only rank 5 candidates. Ranked choice voting is supposed to make tactical voting essentially irrelevant, so this is disappointing.

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I don't disagree it's not ideal if you have more than 5 choices you like, but let's not over criticize a small flaw without appreciating the massive progress here. I read "horrible and unfortunate" and can see how people would take that to mean "back to FPTP".

I voted today and put 3 small candidates and two who "have a chance". I'm really excited to see how those 3 candidates shake out in the rounds, and that alone might give them a lot more power next race. That's super exciting to me and I think we can celebrate that and then push to improve the issues after :)

Yes, sorry, "horrible" was a bit strong and I edited that out of my comment immediately after posting it, heh...

I do appreciate the progress, but I worry that people will regard this incarnation of ranked choice voting as "more complicated" when the entire point is that it's less complicated for the individual voter...

Could you elaborate how RCV is less complicated? Just by eliminating tactical voting? In traditional voting you often limit yourself to the incumbents, isn't that a lot fewer choices?

Limiting yourself to the likely candidates requires a level of awareness around polling - that information is practically forced down our throats since voting in America pretty much requires it, but polling information (what other people think of the candidate) isn't an important piece of information for the voter - it's their opinion the system ideally wants them to express.

RCV is, at a maximum, equally as complicated as FPTP style voting since you have the option to elect only a single choice on your ballot (unless they're doing something weird). The form of the ballot may be visually more overwhelming but that's just from unfamiliarity.

Right, but you can argue ranking N items takes more thought thank picking 1. I like the "interoperable" way, just making choices 2 and onward optional.

Given the wording in the article I'm almost certain that underfilling the selection wouldn't result in a spoiled ballot. People can continue to just pick their favorite dude and go one with their lives. From a survey mentioned in the article apparently only a quarter of potential voters choose to only make a single choice[1].

1. http://maristpoll.marist.edu/wp-content/uploads/2021/06/WNBC...

>you often limit yourself to the incumbents

A voting system where you're limited to only voting for the incumbent is indeed very simple (although not very democractic)... I assume you meant "limit yourself to the frontrunners". :)

In an election where there's exactly two candidates, RCV (or most other alternative voting systems) is the same as simple majority. You're right that with exactly two candidates, tactical voting isn't a concern, and simple majority voting is the simplest and best system. But many elections do not have exactly two candidates - primaries being the most salient example.

With RCV/alternative voting systems, you don't need to know who's popular or "electable" or any of that. You can just go with your most naive, direct take on the candidates.

Say you like two candidates A and B, but most of all you want to make sure candidate Z loses. Just rank A and B first, then everyone else equally, then candidate Z. You don't have to think about who is most likely to beat Z - you don't even have to follow the election at all.

*frontrunners, yes

I wasn't aware you could rank candidates equally, that makes it simpler indeed.

Even if they didn't limit it to 5, you still need to engage in tactical voting in IRV if you don't want to risk throwing your vote away. The spoiler effect is actually still there, it's just harder to understand. The problem is that your second choice only counts if your first choice is eliminated, so it's very possible that none of your rankings matter and have no influence on the outcome if you don't pick one of the top two candidates as your first choice.

> it's very possible that none of your rankings matter and have no influence on the outcome if you don't pick one of the top two candidates as your first choice.

I'm not sure what you're describing. As long as one of the top two candidates appear on your ballot (at any rank) then you have influenced the last round of voting.

Suppose you have three candidates, A, B, and C, and the votes look like this:

45% of voters rank A 1st, B 2nd, C 3rd

25% of voters rank B 1st, A 2nd, C 3rd

30% of voters rank C 1st, B 2nd, A 3rd

Nobody has the majority, so B is eliminated, and A wins round 2 with 70%. But 30% of voters preferred B over A, and if they had ranked B first, then B would've won in the first round with 55%. By voting honestly, the C voters threw away their votes. None of their later rankings mattered, because C was not eliminated before a victor was declared.

All of the strategic situations with instant runoff seem to require more detail on the outcome than anyone can predict in practice. So I’m not sure this will ever actually be a thing for voters think about.

I'm struggling to find a source, but I did read an article once about how some elections in Australia have fallen back to "lesser of two evils" precisely because of the need to vote strategically in order to make sure your vote isn't spoiled.

But suppose you're right and voters rank candidates honestly because they can't predict how to vote strategically; ultimately, I think that is arguably even worse, because even if voters can't predict how to vote strategically in advance, they can certainly still feel resentful after the fact when the results are tallied and it becomes clear that they got screwed over by voting honestly. At least in plurality voting, it's easy to understand the tradeoffs and choose whether you want to vote for a spoiler candidate or not. Surely it will not lead to greater voter enfranchisement for people who find out after they voted that they accidentally spoiled their own votes, and could've had a say in the outcome if they'd expressed their rankings differently.

If this still all sounds hypothetical, keep in mind that this is exactly what happened in the 2009 Burlington, VT mayoral election. The Republican candidate acted as a spoiler for the Democrat (who had the broadest popular support) and instead the Democrat was eliminated and the third-party Progressive candidate was elected. This led to wide-spread dissatisfaction and IRV was repealed there in 2010.

Also, if my example seemed too abstract, let's imagine a real-world presidential election using IRV in a red state like West Virginia. In 2020, Trump got about 70% of the vote. Now suppose Mitt Romney ran as well in a three-way race against Trump and Biden. Since Romney is also a Republican, then it's likely some of the Trump voters would've ranked him first, but most of the Democrats would've still preferred Biden. But since Romney is more moderate than Trump, the Democratic voters would probably still prefer him over Trump. Now the results might look like this:

45% of voters rank Trump 1st, Romney 2nd, Biden 3rd

25% of voters rank Romney 1st, Trump 2nd, Biden 3rd

30% of voters rank Biden 1st, Romney 2nd, Trump 3rd

This seems like a fairly plausible real-world situation, and it also seems pretty easy to imagine how Democrats could look at the polling numbers and realize that Biden is never going to win in their state, and that ranking Romney 1st is their only chance to stop Trump.

How much time must people be putting into politics that they have such nuanced views that make it impossible to express a clear opinion on 4 top candidates and stick a major party candidate in spot 5? I guess New York politics must be vastly different from the West coast, because it's pretty uncommon to see a single race with more than 5 candidates in the first place, and truly unheard of for there to be 5 candidates that have any chance of winning in my experience. Having such strong opinions that this qualifies as "really unfortunate" sounds absolutely exhausting to me.

People on the West coast never strongly dislike a particular candidate and want to make sure they don't win?

What does that have to do with anything? You just don't vote for that candidate in either system.

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