Hacker News Reader

Comment by mindslight | Hacker News Reader

Yeah, it's painful seeing all the enthusiasm IRV gets. I've come to the conclusion it's how people think they want to be able to express support for third party candidates due to their frustration with the current system, but not actually seeing down the line to what happens when non-duopoly options gain some popularity. Basically it's still hopelessly wed to the two party model after the less-popular third parties are run off. It's only redeeming feature is that the same choices can serve as the input to a Condorcet decision process when the failures of IRV become apparent.

View on HN

I think the worst thing about U.S. national elections is that the winner of the electoral vote might not be the winner of the popular vote. Whether or not that is right is beside the point but anything complicated about the results that make them hard to understand will subtract legitimacy. I’d go so far to say that the system will not survive if we got several elections where one particular party consistently loses one vote but wins other.

The last thing we need, seen through that lens, is a complex system where people don’t understand the results or how exactly their vote will affect those results.

> The last thing we need, seen through that lens, is a complex system where people don’t understand the results or how exactly their vote will affect those results.

And this is one of the best features of approval voting compared to any form of ranked choice!

"The winner is preferred to each other candidate, by the majority of voters" seems pretty straightforward to me. The problem with Approval is that we're right back at the Faustian bargain of needing to fully support the lesser evil at the expense of your preferred option. And the only thing Range adds is allowing you to moderate the amount of that bargain.

> "The winner is preferred to each other candidate, by the majority of voters" seems pretty straightforward to me.

It is, but 1) the public needs to be sufficiently convinced that all of the bookkeeping reliably determines which candidate that applies to in the face of possible error or malfeasance, and 2) sometimes there is no such candidate (cycles are possible) and what happens then can be complicated.

(And sure, ties are possible in ~any system, but if we treat cycles as ties we've made ties much more likely.)

If you have a Condorcet winner, sure. In fact, approval voting with "honest" ballots always yields the Condorcet winner if one is expressed†.

Where you get into trouble is that not all elections have a Condorcet winner. In particular:

> The problem with Approval is that we're right back at the Faustian bargain of needing to fully support the lesser evil at the expense of your preferred option.

> It's only redeeming feature is that the same choices can serve as the input to a Condorcet decision process when the failures of IRV become apparent.

I think the concern raised by PaulHoule is very important. Assuming, for the sake of this particular digression, that it can be sufficiently satisfied by IRV in a context under consideration, BTR-IRV seems like an easy sell over IRV. It's like IRV, but instead of discarding the candidate with the least first place votes, you do a head-to-head runoff (looking at the rank ballots you already have) and discard the loser. Not much more complicated to understand or administer, and you can never discard a Condorcet winner (or a member of the Smith set, except in favor of another member of the Smith set).

Reply on news.ycombinator.com