My country has ranked voting. Compulsory ranked voting. No-one seems to have any difficulties with it. What's so hard to understand about rank the candidates in the order that you want them?
I did get the chance to flick through a Californian voter information guide for this last election and it seems like if your goal is to make voting simpler then looking at ballot initiatives would be far more useful.
The issue of complexity is why I'd push for approval voting (i.e. you can upvote multiple candidates). http://zesty.ca/voting/sim/ shows some of the weirdness that comes up with ranked choice voting (what I'd always heard of before as instant runoff voting). It looks even more surprising than what we have!
I've been wondering recently if California would go for a ballot initiative to change their primaries to approval voting or score voting or some other reasonable improvement. Since recently the state has open primaries, meaning you might end up with a general election between two Democrats, or two Republicans, and other weirdness. I can imagine less resistance to a change here, than for the mechanism of the general election.
A problem with all of these systems is that they are harder to understand, resulting in reduced voter confidence, or they demand more from the voter.
Any kind of ranking is going to mean you need to know enough about each candidate to put them in some kind of order. Maybe OK if there are two candidates but much harder after that. Most people will rank their favorite on top and then just randomly rank the remainder.
Simple plurality or majority vote is easiest to understand and easiest for the voter. You vote for the one candidate you like the best. If the isn't a majority for one and that is required, you have a runoff between the top two.
Rank choice and optional preferential voting have their own special tyranny. I just voted for a council election where I had to order at least 5 alderman out of 55 listed candidates. No parties, no voting guides. It was a lot of reading for me.
My understanding is that calculating ranked choice isn’t the easiest thing to do.
In Australia we have a national electoral commission (AEC) who runs the process, have perfected this over decades. So much so that they also run the elections for Registered Organisations (unions) [0].
The story is similar in our state elections where our electoral commissions are so we’ll regarded you can hire them to run elections for your company [1].
This is all to say, trust in the process and the fairness and accuracy of the outcome are paramount to democracy. And that we’ve been doing ranked choice for decades, it works—don’t write it off because there’s teething issues.
I can see merits to the US approach of having thousands of effectively independent elections being run (for a county for example), and the Australian approach where it’s run nationally by a capable independent commission that holds itself to a very high standard.
Stories like this one, where a county is trialling a different election process, are important to share and appreciate—not because they stuffed up, but because they fixed it. It’s one of those counterintuitive times where admitting failure/fault should build trust.
Democracy is slow on purpose. Statistics get us results on election day, but they don’t change the outcome even when they’re wrong. To borrow some jargon, I think it’s more important democracy is observable than it is fast.
Ranked choice voting is, to my knowledge, the most representative process to elect. No vote is wasted. You don’t have to game theory your choice of the lesser of two evils, you rank who you prefer.
It captures your opinion, not the shadow groupthink choices.
We have rank choice voting in my city and it is amazing. I was effectively able to vote for my two favorite candidates who have very similar views with no fear of splitting a vote.
Interestingly though (but not surprisingly) there is a lot of anti rank choice media coverage of the process.
When I tell people my city does that, some respond with “oh that sounds terrible! I heard the news that system is so complicated and hard to run! It probably took you weeks to find out who won!?”
This disconnect between my great experience with the system and the general perception of the process much bigger than I expected.
Now we just have to ask… who benefits from pushing a bad narrative about rank choice voting
Ranked choice is a great thing. The most common implementation of it, Instant Runoff Voting, is terrible; it just throws away all preferences that aren't the top preference. So if you rank A over B over C, the fact that you prefer B over C is completely ignored unless A is eliminated. Better voting systems take all preferences into account.
Ranked choice is only confusing if you just handwave and show the final result.
Put the thing on TV showing each and every round, with boxes moving up the list and off the list, and it’ll be completely obvious how it works.
It’s befuddling that you think it’s actually better to put the complexity on the ballot for each individual voter to wrangle with in the complete privacy of a voting booth.
> I don't understand why having less information is better (theoreticaly).
A ranked-choice ballot only encodes the orders the candidates against one another, whereas approval and score votes also encode the candidates' positions within the voter's range of subjective preferences. That is, if we have 3 candidates (A, B, C) and a few voters which each voters has a range from love to hate for each candidate, like so:
Love Hate
|-A--B-------------------C-|
|-A-------------B-----C----|
|-------------------A-B-C--|
|-A-B---C------------------|
Under ranked choice voting, every one of these voters' ballots would look the same:
1)A, 2)B, 3)C
Ranked choice voting encodes the ordering of the preferences, but the intensity of those preferences is lost when the ballot is cast. Whereas under approval and score voting, every one of these voters represents their preferences differently, because they're reflecting their personal response to each candidate:
Of course, some information is lost in the fact that we only have 2 values approval/disapproval to encode positional preferences. But I would argue this information is already more meaningful than a fully-expressed ranked ballot. And if necessary, score voting can capture more of that information by offering > 2 levels to divide the candidates into.
I agree; if the instructions say you must select a first preference, then failing to do that should be a spoiled ballot. It's impossible, without interviewing the voter, to determine what their intention was.
Having said that, ranked choice is harder for voters to understand, so it makes it easier for them to spoil their ballot. You can ameliorate that using electronic voting machines (which I disapprove of); and you can engage in various kinds of voter education. I'm from an FPTP country, and I wish we had ranked choice. But trying to read a clear intention to a ranking with no first choice is like reading tealeaves, and election officials shouldn't do it.
I still don't get why people like ranked choice so much. Anybody that seriously investigates voting methods can see that it is a highly flawed solution. If we are going to the trouble of changing that, why not reach for the best solutions.
Ranked choice leads to very non-intuitive outcomes (including spoiler effects) and already has done so in a actual elections. Its complex to fill out and it forces choice on people that don't want to choice.
Huh? Ranked voting isn't vulnerable to bullet voting.
If you only rank a single candidate, there's zero benefit, you're just throwing away the rest of your vote. It's not giving that candidate any extra influence, the way it would in approval voting.
> Ranked Choice and all the other alternatives often floated run afoul of the most basic criteria: They are complicated. The people either will not or cannot understand and consequently will not tolerate complicated voting schemes.
Australia has had "ranked choice voting" ("preferential" is what we call it here) for over a century now - starting with the 1919 Australian federal election. If Australians can "understand" and "tolerate" it, why not Americans too?
> Anything more complicated than "<XYZ> gets my vote." is impractically useless.
In America, campaign signs say "Vote For Whoever". In Australia, they say "Vote 1 For Whoever" instead. No real difference. Some people just fill out the rest of the boxes randomly, some people follow a "how to vote" card issued by their preferred candidate, some people think hard about who gets their 2nd/3rd/4th etc. Some Australian states now have "optional preferential", where your vote is still valid even if you don't make a 2nd/3rd/etc choice.
It looks like the article got the Australian implementation somewhat wrong.
Under cons, it says that voters have to rank all candidates on the ballot paper.
In reality you have a choice. You can either rank all, or if you are lazier you can just select your favourite candidate and then your first choice candidate's preferences will be used instead.
Also for some larger ballots (usually the senate with nearly 100 options) there is now a requirement to only rank say the top 10 or so for the ballot to count, so you don't need to number all 100.
This is one of the best features of the Australian system. If you want to do the basic effort you can just tick one box, but if you care about the ordering you can also make your preferences count if you so choose.
As an outsider looking in to American politics, I feel changing to preferential voting is the best bang for buck change to move away from extreme politics. Hopefully this catches on elsewhere.
I'm excited about Ranked Choice Voting [1]. If it was adopted in more races I think we would start to see much more variety on issues rather than being limited to just two viewpoints (i.e. increased third party participation).
My fellow US citizens can't even seem to wrap their minds around something as simple as ranked-choice voting, where instead of selecting the candidate you like best, you instead order the candidates based on how much you like them.
It's an incredibly simple, intuitive change that has the potential to increase overall happiness with the results and disincentivize extremism.
Yet it has been an uphill battle to get ranked-choice voting adopted, and some states and municipalities have even had to revert back to first-past-the-post voting after an outcry from voters.
If voters can't wrap their heads around that, I hardly think they would be able to follow along with the mathematical principles outlined in the Quanta article.
I simply don't get why the person preferring A doesn't rank A first. This scenario only works if you have exactly 3 candidates and the numbers are tight and everyone is tactically voting instead of voting their conscience.
In reality most preferential voting schemes have many candidates, and there's too much chaos to coordinate this kind of scenario.
Meanwhile plurality voting has candidates winning with way less than 50% of the vote, and claiming some mandate from god.
The sooner we ditch FPTP the sooner we get to something like Condorcet, or STV with multimember districts.
I did get the chance to flick through a Californian voter information guide for this last election and it seems like if your goal is to make voting simpler then looking at ballot initiatives would be far more useful.
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