Hacker News Reader

Comment by godelski | Hacker News Reader

Voting systems is one of the few political things I'm very passionate about (those of you that know me will know I won't shut up about this). I really do think this is one of the most important things we can do to fix our democracy. I've always been saddened that Ordinal systems have captured the public eye but Cardinal systems haven't. Everything I have read suggests that Cardinal is leagues better: scalability, ease, verifiability, resistance to strategies, and vse. I'm really happy to see more and more Approval initiatives (I'm a bigger fan of STAR, but Approval is good enough that I'd shut up about voting).

I also suggest other users look for Clay[0] in these threads. He's the co-inventor of STAR and writes a lot about voting. Also a HN user.

[0] https://twitter.com/ClayShentrup

View on HN

> Everything I have read suggests that Cardinal is leagues better

Speaking as a fellow kin who also won't shut up about this, right now we need to just acknowledge that ANYTHING is better than first-past-the-post. At this point I honestly don't care which alternative it is, none of them are worse than the current system. In every jurisdiction where any form of alternative voting system is on the ballot, I will throw my support behind whatever effort has the most momentum, regardless of whether it's approval, star, RCV, whatever. First-past-the-post is killing us with its inevitable descent into bipolarization, and we can figure out a perfect solution once we've stopped the bleeding (keeping in mind that voting system reform is merely a necessary first step, and not sufficient on its own).

> ANYTHING is better than first-past-the-post.

I disagree with this stance. Mostly because how these methods are presented. RCV has gained such popularity because its claims of preventing spoiled elections. But people think that's Bernie spoiling Hillary and not Stein spoiling no one. RCV only prevents weak spoilers where cardinal systems prevent strong spoilers.

The reason I'm so concerned with this is because this is also why RCV got repealed in the past. IN AMERICA. This is my big fear. We all get excited about it, implement a system that doesn't solve the problems we are seeking to solve, and then go back and look for other solutions. We have a solution now, and a wide breadth of them. They just aren't the popular ones.

Bernie didn't spoil Hillary. More Bernie voters voted for Hillary than 2012 Hillary voters voted for Obama.

I think you misunderstood. Bernie made an agreement with the DNC to not run as an independent candidate. The reason being that he would have spoiled the election.

The US was stable for the entire 20th century with FPTP. If it's so bad, why was the US stable for so long with literally the exact same system we have now? Canada's used FPTP for its entire democratic existence, it's one of the most stable democracies on Earth. Britain not only uses FPTP, but uses the most extreme version possible in the Westminster system where the losing party has far fewer rights than they would in the US. Again- another perfectly stable 1st world democracy.

Meanwhile, lots of far more consensus-oriented political systems have utterly collapsed. Weimar Germany used PR- so did Argentina when Peron took over. Rwanda was using PR leading up to its famous genocide in the 90s! The number of parliamentary countries using PR that have collapsed probably exceeds the total number of FPTP countries globally.

Voting or electoral systems just don't matter that much- culture does. If you're a basically stable society, you can use any voting method and be fine- if Japan or the Scandinavian nations adopted FPTP tomorrow, nothing fundamental would change. If you're unstable, you'll be unstable no matter what type of voting system you use. Governments are not computers where a different operating system leads to different results, I'm sorry

You spent two paragraphs arguing that FPTP voting systems are responsible for the stability of the US, Canada and Britain, ("If [FPTP is] so bad, why was the US stable for so long with literally the exact same system we have now?") whereas countries that use consensus-oriented systems tend to collapse into autocracies ("The number of parliamentary countries using PR that have collapsed probably exceeds the total number of FPTP countries globally.") ... and then your final paragraph argues "Voting or electoral systems just don't matter that much- culture does. If you're a basically stable society, you can use any voting method and be fine."

So which is it? Is FPTP the lynchpin of stable democracies, or otherwise irrelevant? Are you making an explicit statement about politics or an implicit statement about culture, here?

>You spent two paragraphs arguing that FPTP voting systems are responsible for the stability of the US, Canada and Britain

I did not say that, I'm sorry that you got that impression. I am saying that political systems overall are simply much less important than many people, including anti-FPTP campaigners, believe. These examples were simply meant to illustrate the non-correlation between government structure & stability- I could just as easily point to how stable most European PR countries are, or how unstable FPTP users like Jamaica, Pakistan and Yemen can be. It's my belief that the US, Canada and Britain would be equally stable under PR. I am very much making an implicit statement about culture.

Fun fact, with a little more research I learned that both South Korea & Taiwan use FPTP for at least some parliamentary offices. Again, if the voting system makes such a huge difference....

Lee Drutman talks a lot about this in his book, "Breaking the Two-Party Doom Loop." [0]

Short version: there used to be much less "party discipline" in US politics. There were lots of sub-factions within the two big parties that would vote differently, depending on the issue. So, it was common for bills to pass with (say) 50% of Democrats voting for them, and 60% of Republicans.

In the 90's (according to Drutman), the parties started being much more "coherent" -- like, all Democrats would favor a bill, and all Republicans would oppose it. This makes it much harder to pass legislation.

[0] https://www.amazon.com/Breaking-Two-Party-Doom-Loop-Multipar...

I read it, I thought it was pretty handwavey. Anyways, doesn't explain how Canada, Britain, South Korea & Taiwan all manage FPTP successfully as stable democracies

Yeah I don't think Lee is a super deep thinker and he gets a lot of basic things wrong. I corrected some of his obvious errors in this piece.

https://thefulcrum.us/amp/actually-approval-voting-beats-rcv...

As a general rule, it is true that plurality voting absolutely sucks. The vast majority of highly rated democracies use something different. The UK and US are ranked 16th and 25th respectively.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Democracy_Index

Taiwan and South Korea both use a significant amount of proportional representation.

But Drutman's biggest fallacy is thinking that you have to have proportional representation. Simple approval voting would plausibly have as big or greater impact.

You missed Canada at #5. And Taiwan (#11) & SK allocating around 15% of their seats to PR- recently, as in the last three years- I would not call a 'significant amount' of PR

> doesn't explain how Canada, Britain, South Korea & Taiwan all manage FPTP successfully as stable democracies

There's a lot of other factors in there besides the method of voting. People often compare the US to other countries over voting but ignore that the systems are substantially different. For example, the UK parliament (and many parliaments) has proportional representation. This is something we don't see in the US congress. And it is important to distinguish that presidential elections are vastly different than congressional/parliamentary elections. Then again, maybe this is part of the problem, that US is hyper focused on the presidential elections but nowhere near similarly engaged in the congressional ones.

The UK does not have proportional representation, that's not correct. FPTP & PR are opposites- you have to choose one system or the other. I agree that presidential systems are probably suboptimal, but it is worth noting that South Korea has a president in addition to FPTP, single rep districts, etc. Again my point- if you're a stable culture, you can make any system work!

On Korea: The National Assembly has 300 members elected for a four-year term, 253 in single-seat constituencies and 47 members by proportional representation.

Yes, and I believe Taiwan has started doing something similar. That's still under 16% of all seats, and- they just started doing this in the last couple of years. They were 100% similar to the US system until very recently

I have long liked and advocated for approval voting (or cardinal methods more generally), or barring that, basically anything but FPTP.

But I'm disillusioned. Many non-plurality methods (including approval) can effectively solve the spoiler problem (i.e. satisfy IIA)... but I no longer think that spoilers are the absolute most important problem to solve.

The most important problem is single-seat districts creating anti-majoritarian, disproportional legislatures. Because of how people geographically sort themselves among the likeminded, even independent districting commissions will not be able to effectively prevent anti-majoritarian legislatures.

For this reason, I believe that we would greatly benefit from explicitly proportional representation. This can be accomplished through cardinal or ordinal means - I no longer care about that dimension. That doesn't mean that we wouldn't enjoy some incremental benefit from approval or really any non-FPTP system. We would. Seattle should go ahead and do its thing. But the fight for better forms of democracy can't stop with any system that retains single-seat districts.

Just getting rid of first-past-the-post would do wonders for our country and by the looks of it approval voting is inferior to run-off voting by a mile.

> by the looks of it approval voting is inferior to run-off voting by a mile.

I'm curious why you think this? I think exactly the opposite. RCV/IRV has major problems, especially for strong spoilers. They are also more difficult to tabulate and with the recent events of the last election the importance of ease to tabulate went up in my priority list (making me even question my preference of score over approval). In fact, IRV also favors extremists, which is something I really don't want.

For more context, this post has some cool interactive features to explain the voting types: https://ncase.me/ballot/

Another problem with RCV is that it’s difficult to understand, at least when you get into the runoffs. That makes it harder for people to understand and trust the election system, which is also very important.

I'm not too big of a fan of this site but it is nice. One thing I wanted to point out is the spoiler effect. Often we talk about it but similarly we generally only talk about a weak spoiler. So I wanted to show an example of a strong spoiler[0]. In this example Hexagon splits Triangles votes just by a little, but the sum of Triangle and Hex are larger than Square. But here IRV has Square winning but Approval has Hex winning.

This is one big issue for me with IRV vs Cardinal systems. Both handle _weak_ spoilers but IRV doesn't handle ''strong,, spoilers. Understanding that these are two different types of spoilers is really important. It is "Bernie vs Hillary" and "Cruz vs Trump." Even with IRV we'd still see the parties trying to prevent strong primary candidates from running independently because they could spoil the election. With cardinal methods (approval, score, star) this is far less of a concern and thus I think more democratic of an election. I honestly think we should be much more concerned with strong spoilers than weak spoilers (weak spoilers don't affect elections much anyways).

[0] https://imgur.com/a/vV15A7Z

I completely agree; I tend to like approval voting just because it is nearly as good as the other scoring methods while being very simple.

Exactly. I say

STAR: 5, Score 4, approval 4, IRV 1, FPTP 1

It would be ranked in this order too, but there's more expressivity here than an ordinal system can provide.

Considering our present division, I have a big "spider-sense" tingle that approval voting will simply result in everyone just voting all blue or all red, that sounds like a bad deal to me. Run off voting would give moderates a good chance of putting the country right side up again.

> everyone just voting all blue or all red

FWIW, this already happens. That will also happen under any system. I'm not sure why you think IRV encourages moderates. It actually encourages extremist candidates which is why I'm particularly against it.

"Everyone" doesn't vote all-red or all-blue. 30% vote all red, 30% all blue, and 40% stay home because there is never a sensible centrist candidate. Each of the 30% active voters then get mistaken for 50% of citizens.

All your assertions are actually complaints about our existing plurality voting system.

IRV/Approval/Borda/Condorcet voting systems all improve those factors. That they have some edge conditions that could be theoretically exploited belies that fact that plurality voting (ie, FPTP / one person one vote) is a complete train wreck for spoilers and favoring extreme voting.

No voting system is perfect (Arrow's impossibility theorem) but some are harder to exploit than others. Staying with a broken system because the proposed replacement isn't perfect is a poor justification.

It looks like nobody's linked to this older visualization yet, so I will: http://zesty.ca/voting/sim/

The non-monotonicity shown there for instant runoff voting seems to be more undesirable than any downsides of approval voting.

IMO the point of elected representation is to be representative, not to elect specific people, so the possibility of a lesser known candidate winning over a major party's favorite candidate isn't a problem.

> No voting system is perfect (Arrow's impossibility theorem)

Arrow's impossibility theorem only says that no _ranked_ voting system is perfect, so it doesn't apply to cardinal methods such as Approval or Score.

> That they have some edge conditions that could be theoretically exploited belies that fact that plurality voting (ie, FPTP / one person one vote) is a complete train wreck for spoilers and favoring extreme voting.

I agree, but I think the nature of the exploitation should still be considered. For IRV, we would be introducing a dependence on unauditable voting machines to tabulate votes, which would make it harder to verify the integrity of future elections.

> Arrow's impossibility theorem only says that no _ranked_ voting system is perfect

I tend to not get into this fight because 1) it extends to cardinal systems with Gibbard's and 2) Arrow's is more about social choice than voting.

Down below I actually give an example of IRV/RCV not solving a strong spoiler case. Clay has also written extensively on the subject matter so I'll defer to him. I'll especially defer to him on explaining how IRV actually encourages extremists.

I think the problem here is that people get caught up in VSE. I get it, that's what I was caught up in when I first started learning about this stuff. Then I had to really dig through strategic voting and spoilage. The nuance of the systems actually do make a very big difference in the outcomes.

I'd love to hear how our current electoral system is in any way preferable to RCV (or Star Voting for example).

Because for many municipalities, it's not whether they move to Approval vs. RCV or IRV or Star, etc - it's moving away from the dumpster fire of plurality voting.

It seems likely that a given municipality will only have the political energy to change voting systems once. Given that, it would be preferable to move to something that isn't RCV/IRV in the first place.

This is what we see historically

I'd argue that instant-runoff is _worse than plurality_. It complicates the voting system, makes the wrong tradeoffs (lack of monotonicity is a very serious one), and I'd really like to hear more about why you think approval voting is worse than runoff (instant or otherwise).

IRV is also very hard to explain to average voters. Approval voting is easy to explain: you get to give a thumbs up or down to every candidate.

In a local mayoral election that used IRV, I've seen some candidates tell their supporters to vote for them in every slot. Either those candidates didn't understand IRV themselves, or they didn't want to try to explain IRV to their supporters.

I prefer https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schulze_method

Though with a candidate modification: add 'none of them / no confidence' as a virtual candidate that can never be removed by the runoff processes. If 'NoT' is the winner then the entire election is thrown out and all of the candidates are banned from the re-run.

Condorcet methods are also hard to explain to voters. The tabulation is rather complicated. At least in comparison to something like cardinal methods. In light of recent recounts I think this is a really important factor to consider. While Condorcet methods have the best VSE, they aren't winning by a huge margin. Besides, VSE isn't everything.

Condorcet methods perform, at best, only a little better than approval voting in computer simulations. And they have only ever been used in one US city (Marquette, MI) which shortly thereafter repealed it. And they are radically more complicated and unlikely to ever see the light of day.

https://electionscience.github.io/vse-sim/vse.html

> Condorcet methods perform, at best, only a little better than approval voting in computer simulations

Computer simulations pretty universally paper over the main problem with approval compared to any ranked-ballot (whether forced or unforced preference) methods by pretending that “approval” has a consistent, cross-voter meaning. (This is an even bigger problem with score-based methods than approval.)

Personally, for simplicity and good enough single winner methods, I prefer Bucklin which is both better than and simpler to explain than IRV, but more critically I prefer minimizing single-winner elections. 5-member legislative districts using a candidate-centric proportional method like STV or the method that has the same relationship to it as Bucklin as to IRV, which AFAIK isn't a named method, would be far superior to any possible system with single-member districts, and basically neutralize districting as a lever for partisan advantage.

Paramount executive elections with a parallel successor (e.g., US Presidential tickets, if they were directly elected, or state Gov/LtGov pairs) can even be made into phased single-winner systems to get some of the advantages of multiwinner systems (not proportionality, but you do get some ability to separate partisan and personal preference in the general election, and to thereby weaken incumbency advantage: basically, use any ranked ballots [0] single winner election for the top spot, eliminate the winner, and rerun the election on the same ballots with the same method for the constitutional successor.)

[0] while I am not partial to them, approval or score systems could be used to; simple FPTP fails because it mean those who voted for the top winner have no voice in the designated successor.

People are actually very familiar with cardinal systems. You have your 5 star ratings (score) for restaurants, apps, etc. You have your thumbs up/down on Netflix. "On a scale from 1 to 10 how do you feel about x" etc. I always see people say that cardinal systems are hard to explain but the fact is that we use systems similar to them on almost a daily basis. (At least the front end is the same)

But I don't support every candidate I would vote for equally.

I don't support every candidate on the ballot equally because I believe every candidate's abilities to do the job vary. First choice, second choice, third choice is not hard to explain and I do not understand why some people think Americans have been lobotimized. NYC now has run off voting and it turned out marvelously, with Eric Adams being elected.

https://vote.nyc/page/ranked-choice-voting

You might be interested in my answer in another thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29266519#29277580

I give an example from this year's Seattle primaries where RCV/IRV would have eliminated the candidate that most accurately reflects the electorate but Approval Voting would not have. That's not a trivial or rare situation, either, it's just such a simple race that it's easy to spot.

It's the guy from the comment!

Always good to see you Clay. Hope you are doing well.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com