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.
> My understanding is that calculating ranked choice isn’t the easiest thing to do.
It really isn't easy. There's an outer for loop that adds significant complexity because you need to do a reduce sum and pop the argmin each time. The more complex the system is, the easier for mistakes. There are plenty of voting systems (see Cardinal Voting) that don't have this computational penalties and can simply be argmax(reduce_sum(votes)).
> Ranked choice voting is, to my knowledge, the most representative process to elect. No vote is wasted.
I highly encourage you to look into more voting systems then. Especially because there are many versions of "ranked choice" voting. I should note that Australia's system is slightly different than what many American states are doing despite them looking the same. There are also Condorcet voting systems (which are ranked/ordinal) and are far more representative. But many people advocate for cardinal systems because you get the same properties as ranked (and some more like handling a strong spoiler -- there are strong and weak spoilers btw) but are far more computationally efficient. The common ranked systems aren't that great on that representation front but as far as ordinal systems are concerned they are computationally simple.
Definitions:
- Ordinal voting: systems where candidates are ordered or ranked in comparison to other candidates.
- Cardinal voting: systems where candidates are assigned a score or preference value independent of other candidates.
I used to think that Australian preferential voting was the best practical method. Though the Ranked Choice Voting debate in the US has taught me that STAR voting and approval voting are both easier to count and avoid some edge cases.
Even in your situation it doesn’t make sense to me to use ranked choice. Might as well use score voting so you can say how much more you prefer one candidate to another.
All voting systems have drawbacks, but I think approval is best relative to effort and impact.
> 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.
I'm really not sure people realize how chaotic and unpredictable ranked choice voting can be, and how easily it can be gamed.
For example, there are scenarios where it's better to put your favorite candidate in #3. You pick #1 to help an undervoted candidate and therefore, causing one candidate to drop off. Same for #2. By the time the choice comes to #3, your minority candidate has suddenly managed to eliminate stronger opposition just by playing numbers.
We've seen this scenario happen repeatedly in all countries and counties that have tried this approach.
There's a reason ranked choice voting is hardly ever used anywhere: it's really not such a good idea.
I feel like a lot of people take it as obvious that ranked-choice is just better. I have an alternate take:
We just went through a simple first-past-the-post election in the US that a significant percentage of voters believe was rigged. This is the simplest system imaginable, the data is easily available to verify it was not rigged.
Do we really think the average american will be able to grok how ranked-choice voting works? Imagine for a moment the reaction from people when their candidate appears to be "winning" and then ends up 3rd after the "recalculation."
I feel like the first priority of a voting system needs to be transparency and being easy to understand, RCV isn't that. Maybe works well on small scale, I highly doubt it's a good idea nationally.
First, Ranked Choice is not a single election strategy; it depends how you handle the case when your top choice is not elected. You are probably thinking of Instant Runoff Voting (IRV), where the bottom choice is eliminated and everyone who picked that candidate as their top choice gets their votes transferred to their next choices respectively.
IRV is better than our current system, but not by that much. Range (aka Score) Voting -- where you give each candidate a score from 1-10, like a judge in the olympics -- is much better. http://rangevoting.org/ (alias: http://scorevoting.net/) has a wealth of information on this topic, albeit in a website straight outta 2005.
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.
One issue with ranked choice is that it's more complicated than some alternatives like approval voting, and certain ranked choice methods (non-Condorcet ones) can encourage strategic voting or produce surprising results.
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.
Ranked choice has a lot of advantages over the alternatives that are often underestimated by people too worried about theory.
The big advantage of ranked choice is that it is simple to understand and implement.
In elections, it is essential that the average person understand exactly how the system works. An election result that people don't understand/trust is worse than useless.
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.
Australia has ranked choice voting and it has not resulted in Australia making better decisions. I'd argue that in muddling the level of preference between options by overquantizing things, it biases elections towards the status quo and a complete lack of change, and motivates the two main parties to minimize (or eliminate) their differences.
It can be better to pick the one you like most rather than to sort a bunch of candidates, some of which will be inauthentic and strategic, evenly along a continuum. In a field of nine, that transforms the number one candidate from being preferred over the number nine candidate to being nine times better than the number one candidate.
I think there's a reason that Australia requires that you rank all choices. If you don't, it spoils your vote. If you intentionally spoil your vote, that's actually a crime in Australia (don't listen to people who tell you that the least Australia requires is that you turn in a blank ballot; Australia disagrees.) You're not even allowed to ask people not to rank certain candidates. It is a jailable offense:
> In 1986 Albert Langer wrote a conference paper entitled Don't Vote, examining possible electoral strategy for the left, aiming to bring down the Labor government and to target ALP candidates in marginal seats. In 1987 and 1990 there were instances where Victorian voters were urged to take advantage of section 270 of the Commonwealth Electoral Act and give less preferred parties equal last preferences (now known as a Langer vote), so as not to express a choice for either major party.
> As a result of his imprisonment, Amnesty International declared him the first Australian prisoner of conscience for over 20 years.
Ranked choice (and obligatory) voting inflates the support for status quo parties. It's also a way to make that pesky 40% who don't vote because they hate both parties disappear.
Many people suggest ranked choice, but it has the significant problem that you might have little idea who won or who is leading until the very last vote is in. One vote in a close race could kick off a chain of events that changes everything. And for a Federal election, a stupid and stubborn state (like the one I'm living in) could stall and delay submitting their results for weeks.
Approval voting doesn't have this problem. When there's a clear winner, it's obvious and you can get back to business.
I find this example kinda 'eh'. FPTP also elects a 'wrong' winner, and it's not clear to me that the IRV is substantially wronger.
I agree that there's probably a better way, but I fear that it could be at the cost of either ease of use or methodological clarity. Ranking candidates is relatively intuitive, and so is sequential elimination with votes reassigned to the next preference.
I recognize that you could transform the rankings people provide into head to head match up, but if the methodology is too opaque to the layperson, it's going to breed distrust in the system, and I fear that that would be overall worse (if it discourages participation) than having a minority of elections be won by the 'wrong' candidate versus better approaches.
I recognize that this could also be an argument in favor of FPTP. I do think there's a continuum here of conceptual difficulty, and I think finding the sweet spot of correctness vs intuitiveness is tricky.
Surely this is more about parliamentary process which is somewhat independent of the voting scheme? How do you even measure the success of a voting scheme? Most modern democracies use a form of proportional representation these days. This is particularly true in Europe, where most countries also score higher than the US on the Democracy Index: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Democracy_Index .
Even in the US, non-FPTP voting is starting to happen here and there. San Fran's mayoral elections used a ranked choice system if I'm not mistaken.
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.
This is all to say, keep going it is worth it.
[0] https://www.aec.gov.au/ieb/ [1] https://www.vec.vic.gov.au/voting/types-of-elections/other-e...
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