Hacker News Reader

Comment by BitwiseFool | Hacker News Reader

Ranked Choice Voting is seen as a panacea to two party politics and polarization. Only time will tell if it actually helps this. But no matter how you feel about it, RCV is demonstrably more complicated than FPTP. And to address that complexity you need more bureaucrats, volunteers, software, and machines to tally and certify the results. In every step of the process you introduce more opportunities for error, and if we're being honest, fraud. And, New York City is well known for machine politics, corruption, and cronyism.

View on HN

The sad thing is, Ranked Choice Voting isn't even the scientific consensus. The theorists have settled around cardinal and almost-cardinal methods (which IRV=RCV isn't), and the advocates who follow theorists have settled on Approval. But money backs RCV, so voting legislation pushes RCV.

RCV in the US: "2 states, 1 county, 26 cities outside of Utah and 23 Utah cities" https://www.fairvote.org/rcv#where_is_ranked_choice_voting_u...

Approval in the US: Fargo and St. Louis

RCV campaigners hijacked public perception of the science. As an analogy, people don't believe in global warming because they have evaluated the evidence; they believe it because the scientists tell them to. RCV campaigners skipped the scientists and manufactured a false consensus around RCV. So RCV is what the common person associates with voting method reform.

> Ranked Choice Voting is seen as a panacea to two party politics and polarization.

I suspect that, if Instant Runoff Voting—I will continue not to reward the marketing effort of trying to claim the name “Ranked Choice Voting” for the worst seriously-advocated ranked choice election method—is seen as a panacea for anything, it’s by a very small fraction of even the people that prefer it to FPTP voting.

> But no matter how you feel about it, RCV is demonstrably more complicated than FPTP.

Forget FPTP, IRV is more complicated than many other ranked-ballots methods that aren’t Condorcet methods, and needlessly so.

I still don't think Condorcet is complicated. If one candidate would beat all others head-to-head, that candidate is the winner. It's just the loop-breaking algorithms that make it complicated, and people get hung up on those when they're relatively rare. Besides, if there's a loop you could just hold some sort of a runoff for the looped candidates.

One of the major disservices to Condorcet is that the vote-theorist communities insist on talking about the loop-breaking algorithms as being Condorcet methods, rather than as separate tie-breaking (loop-breaking) processes that are bolted on after identifying the (usually 1-member) Smith Set. Some of this is because the algorithmic implementations do both steps at once, but it's not necessary.

> I still don't think Condorcet is complicated.

Conceptually, no. But we’re talking about, mostly, tallying complexity. Condorcet itself, and therefore some but not all Condorcet methods, is “simpler” than IRV in that the number of values that need to be tracked is smaller (at least where the ratio of the size of the electorate to the number of candidates is large, as it typically is in public election of officials), but that's not true of all Condorcet methods.

> One of the major disservices to Condorcet is that the vote-theorist communities insist on talking about the loop-breaking algorithms as being Condorcet methods, rather than as separate tie-breaking (loop-breaking) processes that are bolted on after identifying the (usually 1-member) Smith Set. Some of this is because the algorithmic implementations do both steps at once, but it's not necessary.

That's not a “disservice to Condorcet”, its a necessity for the evaluation of real-world election methods.

I mean it's a disservice to communicating and messaging about Condorcet by making it seem more complicated than it is. There are countless Condorcet variants, of various complexity. To look at the complexity of those variants and paint with a broad brush by saying that "Condorcet is complicated" does a disservice to the aim of seeking broader acceptance of Condorcet.

An example is that the Condorcet Method (identifying the usually single-winner Smith Set) is not subject to the same various "voting flaws" that the various tie breaking mechanisms are. But then the community is happy to say that Condorcet is flawed along those lines when it's not.

The NYC BOE is a state agency. The incompetence here lies with Cuomo, just like a lot of other issues plaguing the city.

> The NYC BOE is a state agency. The incompetence here lies with Cuomo, just like a lot of other issues plaguing the city

It's actually worse than that. The NYCBOE is not actually a state agency - it's an "administrative body" that's comprised of people selected by the two main political parties, and staffed by their family members. After they are appointed, they aren't under the oversight of any elected official.[0]

You're correct that the buck stops with Cuomo, though - changing this system would require him authorizing legislation at the state level. Due to the way New York's legislative process works, it's impossible for legislation to even reach a floor vote in the Senate without the governor's approval; the governor can essentially veto a bill behind closed doors by refusing to let it have a floor vote.

[0] https://www.nytimes.com/2020/10/26/nyregion/nyc-voting-elect...

The thing I don't get is what's Cuomo's game?

For 8 years now it seems like his only goals are massaging his ego and fucking over NYC as much as possible. What's the point?

> The thing I don't get is what's Cuomo's game? For 8 years now it seems like his only goals are massaging his ego and fucking over NYC as much as possible. What's the point?

You said it yourself: it's all about his ego. It's the one consistent theme throughout literally every aspect of his behavior.

Does the BOE run any “real” elections, or are they only responsible for party primaries?

It’s been noted many times that a party primary is basically a meaningless farce, since the DNC/RNC can invent any arbitrary procedure for selecting their candidates.

> Does the BOE run any “real” elections, or are they only responsible for party primaries?

All elections are run by the Board of Elections

> It’s been noted many times that a party primary is basically a meaningless farce, since the DNC/RNC can invent any arbitrary procedure for selecting their candidates.

The party control is actually much deeper than that. Parties can even cancel primary elections altogether if they want their "blessed" candidate to run in the general election without having to go through a primary.

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/18/nyregion/new-york-politic...

Then how do other countries manage to do it?

I'd love to give you an answer on that, but I can't. Additionally, I don't know how helpful it would be since the corruption here is endemic.

Edit: What I mean is, you can look over at a place like Switzerland and say "we should really run our elections like they do". But to do that you'd have to get the city officials, bureaucrats, and the party machine to relinquish power and have a change of heart... which I doubt will happen without some outside policing.

Practice, competence, and probably more funding. I doubt members of the DOE are highly paid in NYC compared to market rates. The original comment still stands though. RCV is more complicated and therefore prone to error.

It's still worth doing though.

Getting the election on even years would also help :-/

> Practice, competence, and probably more funding. I doubt members of the DOE are highly paid in NYC compared to market rates

Other places do it by actually having a professional, independent state/city agency administer elections, instead of allowing the political parties to nominate their relatives to run the Board of Elections.

In New York, elections are literally run by the party leaders and their relatives.

> The county party chairs choose the board’s 10 commissioners — one Democrat and one Republican from each borough — and most other board employees. Tradition dictates that when staffers leave, they are replaced by someone from the same party and borough.

> Employees include Beth Fossella, the head of voter registration and mother of a former Republican congressman from Staten Island, Vito J. Fossella; Thomas Sattie, director of ballot management and son of the former Brooklyn Democratic district leader Maryrose Sattie; Pamela Perkins, administrative manager and wife of Democratic City Councilman Bill Perkins; Raphael Savino, deputy general counsel and brother of Joseph Savino, the former Bronx Republican leader; and Daniel Ortiz, deputy clerk in Brooklyn and son of Assemblyman Felix W. Ortiz, a Democrat.

> The list of relatives stretches even to the agency’s computer programmers, including Rubén Díaz III, a Democrat who is the son of the Bronx borough president and grandson of a City Council member.

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/10/26/nyregion/nyc-voting-elect...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com