8 ms·

My vote on voting systems

70 points by max__dev 2y ago

jszymborski 2y ago
No voting method meets every criterion but two of my favourites are - Schulze Method [0] - Ranked Pairs [1] The Schulze method allows for a simple ranked choice ballot, and satisfies more criteria than other RCV methods. Downside is that it is hecking complicated so it can feel like an opaque process. With distrustful electors it's a no go imo. The Ranked Pairs method satisfies a similar number of criteria as Schulze, and meets a weaker version of later-no-harm. It's also a very intuitive method. The main downside is that the ballots become impossibly long, scaling quadratically with the number of candidates. [0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schulze_method https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schulze_method [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ranked_pairs https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ranked_pairs
- nearting 2y ago
  Ranked pairs does not have a quadratic ballot length, since all of the preference information can be computed from a single ranking of the candidates.
  - jszymborski 2y ago
    How did I never realize this. Thank you. EDIT: I was also swapped "later-no-harm" with "independence of irrelevant alternatives". I should stop writing comments before my morning coffee.
    - mindslight 2y ago
      I've been going around saying we need to push in the direction of a Condorcet voting system while handwaving away the possibility of a Condorcet tie, because all systems can result in ties. I hadn't realized there was a straightforward method that drastically reduced the amount of ties neatly called "Ranked Pairs". And that's with plenty of coffee. Now if only we can change the political zeitgeist from "Ranked Choice Voting" implying Instant Runoff Voting, to RCV implying Ranked Pairs. IRV is merely what victims of the two party duopoly think they want to express their current frustration, but it would fall apart the more we actually got away from the one dimensional spectrum.
intalentive 2y ago
Unanimous.ai has an interesting approach: instead of static snapshots, make voting a dynamic, real-time process where preferences are elicited through action.
yellowapple 2y ago
It's weird to me how little score/approval voting has caught on (at least here in the US) amid the push to replace FPTP. It's a lot simpler to explain than RCV, and has a lot fewer downsides overall than both RCV and FPTP.
- ztetranz 2y ago
  Approval voting might be good but just at a human level, I think it can leave the voter feeling unsatisfied. If there is one candidate that I really like and another that I could only accept reluctantly as an alternative to someone worse then it feels bad that I need to "approve" of those two equally.
  - ClayShentrup 2y ago
    what matters is satisfaction with the election outcome, not the five minutes you spent filling out a ballot. https://rpubs.com/Jameson-Quinn/vse6 https://rpubs.com/Jameson-Quinn/vse6
- ekimekim 2y ago
  Being vulnerable to strategic voting is a huge downside that outweighs other considerations. As the article mentions, in the real world score voting would just be approval voting where you put a max score on some choices and 0 on others. And in approval voting you need to think about how others will vote and pick your cutoff point based on who you think has a chance - do you vote "yes" for the center-right party to avoid the hard right party getting in? Or do you vote "no" to help the center-left party beat the center-right party? (swap those directions to personal preference) RCV isn't perfect, but in all but the smallest elections there's really no practical strategic voting considerations. You just state your true preference order. Of course, I'll take any of them over FPTP.
  - yellowapple 2y ago
    > Being vulnerable to strategic voting is a huge downside that outweighs other considerations. I disagree that strategic voting as a downside outweighs the downsides of RCV or FPTP - especially when FPTP itself is susceptible to strategic voting, too. None of the three satisfy the condorcet winner criterion (that is: none of them guarantee the winner would beat every other candidate head-to-head), but it seems less likely / more contrived for score/approval voting to fail it. > And in approval voting you need to think about how others will vote and pick your cutoff point based on who you think has a chance - do you vote "yes" for the center-right party to avoid the hard right party getting in? Or do you vote "no" to help the center-left party beat the center-right party? (swap those directions to personal preference) That's why I'd personally go with a simple three-level score vote: "yeah", "meh", or "nah". If people really want to shoot themselves in the foot by ignoring the "meh" option, then so be it, but at least the option is there for people to vote "meh" for candidates that are merely acceptable/tolerable (and reserve "yeah" for ideal candidates and "nah" for unacceptable/intolerable candidates).
theluketaylor 2y ago
The mathematical challenges of voting systems is one of the reasons I've come to support multi-member districts. When only a single person can represent a jurisdiction you're always going to have people disappointed in the choice and we have have plenty of proofs that perfect voting isn't possible, so we need to aim for best reasonable compromise. Voting is even more about identifying who didn't win than who did win. In a multi-member district a much smaller slice of the electorate 'loses', making it much easier to build broad consensus around results. Some of the sharper edges of many ranked choice or scoring voting systems are blunted by multi-member districts. They are not winner-take-all, so small changes in expressed preference that would have changed the winner in a single member district just re-orders the winners. Specific candidates could still find themselves losing when another system would have elected them, but the electorate as a whole still ends up with representation they can tolerate.
- jfengel 2y ago
  Multi member districts does circumvent one of the assumptions of Duverger's Law, which predicts a two-party system. But you still need to work around collusions between candidates. Candidates will be pushed to run on a slate of N candidates for N seats, and promise to support each other. Voters who want any of their positions will avoid somebody who would interfere with their own top priority. The result acts the same as a two party system, where all N candidates support the same party. You can get some benefit by combining it with List Voting, where you go ahead and reify the party system. The party gets to send whoever it wants, proportional to the votes.That makes it harder to run multiple candidates that take all of the spots. (Not impossible: they can break into multiple virtual parties. But that's risky and coordinating votes is difficult.) Even at that I'm not sure it really helps. Lawmaking is still fundamentally a "single member" operation: a bill either passes or it doesn't. You still get pushed to be in either the majority or minority coalition.
  - johngladtj 2y ago
    >Even at that I'm not sure it really helps. Lawmaking is still fundamentally a "single member" operation: a bill either passes or it doesn't. You still get pushed to be in either the majority or minority coalition. The solution for that is to not make it a simple binary pass/fail, but to have how it passes and fails affect the outcome. A simple and consistent way of doing this is by making it so that all laws have a built in expiration date, and how big the majority for passing the bill affects how long the law is in effect from. A 50% + 1 margin of victory should result in the law becoming void the moment the parliament composition changes. Perhaps a 60% margin might allow it to go for 10 years, a 70% margin for 15 years, and so on. Constitutional changes should essentially require unanimity ( and a referendum on top of it) since they are the only permanent laws. Some laws would be more or less "permanent" since every 30 years or so you'd like get a 99%+ majority for a "theft is illegal" type low, but other more controversial would likely be on the ballots every few years.
dang 2y ago
We replaced the linkbait "you" in the title with a nicely first-person phrase from the end of the article. If there's a better* title, we can change it again. * better = more accurate and neutral, preferably using representative language from the article https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- mdp2021 2y ago
  # "Voting system[s hardly] work"
hooverd 2y ago
I think STAR voting wins out in quality as a voting system and understandability to people who don't know what a voting system is.
boxed 2y ago
I think there's also a different and deeper question: what does the voting system do to the society it is running on. This is a very different kind of discussion than "does it map preferences well", but arguably more important.
tromp 2y ago
> However, they might decide to vote strategically to amplify their vote — giving Desert a score of 10 while giving everything else a score of 1 would effectively make their vote stronger. It makes more sense for the voter to give their favorite candidate a 10, their least favorite a 0, and grade every other candidate on the spectrum between their two extreme picks. So that still seems to be as informative as you could hope for.
throwaway_1224 2y ago
I think the state of democracy in the "factory bamboozling" era is such that we need a system that reflects direct voter preferences less, not more. The trick is coming up with a system that diverges towards the interest of the masses, rather than the elites or the corrupt or the foreign. Basically, the system must get the voters' preferences wrong, but get them wrong right. This is really akin to the nature of representative democracy. Elected leaders manage the voters' interest rather than always doing what is polling better on that day. It's obviously a tricky task, but it's the hallmark of the best-functioning democracies. Right now we're about as far from the goal as we've ever been. Our systems have been hacked and we don't have an effective counter.
- int_19h 2y ago
  This is a very long-winded way to say that democracy is a bad idea if it's not just for show.
  - throwaway_1224 2y ago
    "Just for show" would be foregone conclusion elections like Russia's or ignored elections like Venezuela's. Voters must still be central to the system and get the final say for it to be democratic. The system just needs to be wiser and more resilient. For instance, the Electoral College was originally intended to be more than a bunch of sworn minions. In Europe, many parliamentary democracies have strong party infrastructures that prevent their takeover by "memetic" forces. There are endless possible improvements.
- cogman10 2y ago
  What we need, IMO, is direct legislation. Many states have this and I think federally having the ability to put up and vote on a bill would do a lot to correct many of the issues we currently face. Barring that, RCV would do wonders for the current political ecosystem.
  - valiant55 2y ago
    We should do away with voting and select our representatives randomly, similar to jury duty. We'd need a society that places value on civil service and is better educated and willing to listen to experts to hash out legislation. Elections are only good for finding the most popular candidate instead of the most qualified for office. Keep terms medium length (e.g. four years) and you'll have people focus on the greater good instead of personal benefit because at the end of their term they have to live in the society they helped build.
ajuc 2y ago
Proportional + threshold is simpler and better in practice than most of these. Yes it's not a direct equivalent (you have to change the problem so it has a good solution). Also the problem in some countries isn't the voting system alone, it's the unlimited donations by billionaires, unchecked gerrymandering and general institutional decay. System doesn't matter when people get away with ignoring it.
smitty1e 2y ago
12-year election officer here. This idea is great for small groups of informed voters. However, I submit that there are (at least) three other crucial discussions to have: - Does my status as an informed voter bias me toward a system for which I have done all the homework? - Does my script that works fine in my dev system with relatively clean test data scale to an enterprise deployment and real-world loading? - How significant in improvement is needful to pay for the switching costs? Twice as good? An order of magnitude? Because I submit that, for all the virtues we informed types can see in RCV, it is prone to malicious attacks, e.g. flooding the ballot with a bunch of relatively unknown candidates. Furthermore, if there is any sort of contention involved, the complexities are going to lead to (likely unfounded) claims of tinkering. I'm a huge fan of the ditt-kuh-pow! (DTTCPOW, the Dumbest Thing That Could Possibly Work): - Make Election Day a federal holiday - Paper ballots - In-person voting except in strictly controlled, marginal cases (e.g. deployed military). Everyone trading security for convenience is misguided, in my opinion. You want to mark a ballot and cast it in secret so that, whatever you have to say to appease the shrieking neighbor, you and your ballot are as physically secure as possible. Staff the process so that pollbooks are <5k people. We get it done with ~20 people in my county for 13hrs on election day. ~240 precincts in the county. Not cheap, and yes, exhausting to staff. So, what? Staff, equip and support them and elections, can be a positive experience for all involved.
- exmadscientist 2y ago
  FWIW, after living in an all-mail voting state (WA), I never want to go back to voting in person. It is amazing having a couple weeks to mark a ballot at my leisure, do as much research as I want, and then just drop it in a box (or mail it, I guess, but the drop boxes have definitely been more reliable for me). But it's true I don't have a shrieking neighbor or brutal spouse to worry about.
  - seniorivn 2y ago
    serious question, how do you know your vote is counted and is not intercepted/counterfeited before that?
KenSF 2y ago
My vote is 'any 1 election runoff system'[score, star, approval, ranked choice, ...]. Every 1ER is better than first past the post. It would be nice if vote nerds would shut the frak up about this one is better than that on. Open primaries; top 4 or 5 go through to the general; general uses any 1ER. Were I writing a law to put this in place, I would say we should revisit which 1ER after X number of years or Y voting cycles.
grumpymuppet 2y ago
I love the promise of ranked choice voting (and other schemes). Properly implemented it seems like it could be a magic bullet to balancing some of the political divide and drawing out candidates and ideas that would satisfy more than just the extremes... But, oh boy: we have trouble with simple plurality voting. How would you explain the outcome to people if it was implemented broadly?

70 points by max__dev 2y ago

No voting method meets every criterion but two of my favourites are - Schulze Method [0] - Ranked Pairs [1] The Schulze method allows for a simple ranked choice ballot, and satisfies more criteria than other RCV methods. Downside is that it is hecking complicated so it can feel like an opaque process. With distrustful electors it's a no go imo. The Ranked Pairs method satisfies a similar number of criteria as Schulze, and meets a weaker version of later-no-harm. It's also a very intuitive method. The main downside is that the ballots become impossibly long, scaling quadratically with the number of candidates. [0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schulze_method https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schulze_method [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ranked_pairs https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ranked_pairs

nearting 2y ago
Ranked pairs does not have a quadratic ballot length, since all of the preference information can be computed from a single ranking of the candidates.
- jszymborski 2y ago
  How did I never realize this. Thank you. EDIT: I was also swapped "later-no-harm" with "independence of irrelevant alternatives". I should stop writing comments before my morning coffee.
  - mindslight 2y ago
    I've been going around saying we need to push in the direction of a Condorcet voting system while handwaving away the possibility of a Condorcet tie, because all systems can result in ties. I hadn't realized there was a straightforward method that drastically reduced the amount of ties neatly called "Ranked Pairs". And that's with plenty of coffee. Now if only we can change the political zeitgeist from "Ranked Choice Voting" implying Instant Runoff Voting, to RCV implying Ranked Pairs. IRV is merely what victims of the two party duopoly think they want to express their current frustration, but it would fall apart the more we actually got away from the one dimensional spectrum.

intalentive 2y ago

Unanimous.ai has an interesting approach: instead of static snapshots, make voting a dynamic, real-time process where preferences are elicited through action.

yellowapple 2y ago

It's weird to me how little score/approval voting has caught on (at least here in the US) amid the push to replace FPTP. It's a lot simpler to explain than RCV, and has a lot fewer downsides overall than both RCV and FPTP.

ztetranz 2y ago
Approval voting might be good but just at a human level, I think it can leave the voter feeling unsatisfied. If there is one candidate that I really like and another that I could only accept reluctantly as an alternative to someone worse then it feels bad that I need to "approve" of those two equally.
- ClayShentrup 2y ago
  what matters is satisfaction with the election outcome, not the five minutes you spent filling out a ballot. https://rpubs.com/Jameson-Quinn/vse6 https://rpubs.com/Jameson-Quinn/vse6
ekimekim 2y ago
Being vulnerable to strategic voting is a huge downside that outweighs other considerations. As the article mentions, in the real world score voting would just be approval voting where you put a max score on some choices and 0 on others. And in approval voting you need to think about how others will vote and pick your cutoff point based on who you think has a chance - do you vote "yes" for the center-right party to avoid the hard right party getting in? Or do you vote "no" to help the center-left party beat the center-right party? (swap those directions to personal preference) RCV isn't perfect, but in all but the smallest elections there's really no practical strategic voting considerations. You just state your true preference order. Of course, I'll take any of them over FPTP.
- yellowapple 2y ago
  > Being vulnerable to strategic voting is a huge downside that outweighs other considerations. I disagree that strategic voting as a downside outweighs the downsides of RCV or FPTP - especially when FPTP itself is susceptible to strategic voting, too. None of the three satisfy the condorcet winner criterion (that is: none of them guarantee the winner would beat every other candidate head-to-head), but it seems less likely / more contrived for score/approval voting to fail it. > And in approval voting you need to think about how others will vote and pick your cutoff point based on who you think has a chance - do you vote "yes" for the center-right party to avoid the hard right party getting in? Or do you vote "no" to help the center-left party beat the center-right party? (swap those directions to personal preference) That's why I'd personally go with a simple three-level score vote: "yeah", "meh", or "nah". If people really want to shoot themselves in the foot by ignoring the "meh" option, then so be it, but at least the option is there for people to vote "meh" for candidates that are merely acceptable/tolerable (and reserve "yeah" for ideal candidates and "nah" for unacceptable/intolerable candidates).

theluketaylor 2y ago

The mathematical challenges of voting systems is one of the reasons I've come to support multi-member districts. When only a single person can represent a jurisdiction you're always going to have people disappointed in the choice and we have have plenty of proofs that perfect voting isn't possible, so we need to aim for best reasonable compromise. Voting is even more about identifying who didn't win than who did win. In a multi-member district a much smaller slice of the electorate 'loses', making it much easier to build broad consensus around results. Some of the sharper edges of many ranked choice or scoring voting systems are blunted by multi-member districts. They are not winner-take-all, so small changes in expressed preference that would have changed the winner in a single member district just re-orders the winners. Specific candidates could still find themselves losing when another system would have elected them, but the electorate as a whole still ends up with representation they can tolerate.

jfengel 2y ago
Multi member districts does circumvent one of the assumptions of Duverger's Law, which predicts a two-party system. But you still need to work around collusions between candidates. Candidates will be pushed to run on a slate of N candidates for N seats, and promise to support each other. Voters who want any of their positions will avoid somebody who would interfere with their own top priority. The result acts the same as a two party system, where all N candidates support the same party. You can get some benefit by combining it with List Voting, where you go ahead and reify the party system. The party gets to send whoever it wants, proportional to the votes.That makes it harder to run multiple candidates that take all of the spots. (Not impossible: they can break into multiple virtual parties. But that's risky and coordinating votes is difficult.) Even at that I'm not sure it really helps. Lawmaking is still fundamentally a "single member" operation: a bill either passes or it doesn't. You still get pushed to be in either the majority or minority coalition.
- johngladtj 2y ago
  >Even at that I'm not sure it really helps. Lawmaking is still fundamentally a "single member" operation: a bill either passes or it doesn't. You still get pushed to be in either the majority or minority coalition. The solution for that is to not make it a simple binary pass/fail, but to have how it passes and fails affect the outcome. A simple and consistent way of doing this is by making it so that all laws have a built in expiration date, and how big the majority for passing the bill affects how long the law is in effect from. A 50% + 1 margin of victory should result in the law becoming void the moment the parliament composition changes. Perhaps a 60% margin might allow it to go for 10 years, a 70% margin for 15 years, and so on. Constitutional changes should essentially require unanimity ( and a referendum on top of it) since they are the only permanent laws. Some laws would be more or less "permanent" since every 30 years or so you'd like get a 99%+ majority for a "theft is illegal" type low, but other more controversial would likely be on the ballots every few years.

dang 2y ago

We replaced the linkbait "you" in the title with a nicely first-person phrase from the end of the article. If there's a better* title, we can change it again. * better = more accurate and neutral, preferably using representative language from the article https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

mdp2021 2y ago
# "Voting system[s hardly] work"

hooverd 2y ago

I think STAR voting wins out in quality as a voting system and understandability to people who don't know what a voting system is.

boxed 2y ago

I think there's also a different and deeper question: what does the voting system do to the society it is running on. This is a very different kind of discussion than "does it map preferences well", but arguably more important.

tromp 2y ago

> However, they might decide to vote strategically to amplify their vote — giving Desert a score of 10 while giving everything else a score of 1 would effectively make their vote stronger. It makes more sense for the voter to give their favorite candidate a 10, their least favorite a 0, and grade every other candidate on the spectrum between their two extreme picks. So that still seems to be as informative as you could hope for.

throwaway_1224 2y ago

I think the state of democracy in the "factory bamboozling" era is such that we need a system that reflects direct voter preferences less, not more. The trick is coming up with a system that diverges towards the interest of the masses, rather than the elites or the corrupt or the foreign. Basically, the system must get the voters' preferences wrong, but get them wrong right. This is really akin to the nature of representative democracy. Elected leaders manage the voters' interest rather than always doing what is polling better on that day. It's obviously a tricky task, but it's the hallmark of the best-functioning democracies. Right now we're about as far from the goal as we've ever been. Our systems have been hacked and we don't have an effective counter.

int_19h 2y ago
This is a very long-winded way to say that democracy is a bad idea if it's not just for show.
- throwaway_1224 2y ago
  "Just for show" would be foregone conclusion elections like Russia's or ignored elections like Venezuela's. Voters must still be central to the system and get the final say for it to be democratic. The system just needs to be wiser and more resilient. For instance, the Electoral College was originally intended to be more than a bunch of sworn minions. In Europe, many parliamentary democracies have strong party infrastructures that prevent their takeover by "memetic" forces. There are endless possible improvements.
cogman10 2y ago
What we need, IMO, is direct legislation. Many states have this and I think federally having the ability to put up and vote on a bill would do a lot to correct many of the issues we currently face. Barring that, RCV would do wonders for the current political ecosystem.
- valiant55 2y ago
  We should do away with voting and select our representatives randomly, similar to jury duty. We'd need a society that places value on civil service and is better educated and willing to listen to experts to hash out legislation. Elections are only good for finding the most popular candidate instead of the most qualified for office. Keep terms medium length (e.g. four years) and you'll have people focus on the greater good instead of personal benefit because at the end of their term they have to live in the society they helped build.

ajuc 2y ago

Proportional + threshold is simpler and better in practice than most of these. Yes it's not a direct equivalent (you have to change the problem so it has a good solution). Also the problem in some countries isn't the voting system alone, it's the unlimited donations by billionaires, unchecked gerrymandering and general institutional decay. System doesn't matter when people get away with ignoring it.

smitty1e 2y ago

12-year election officer here. This idea is great for small groups of informed voters. However, I submit that there are (at least) three other crucial discussions to have: - Does my status as an informed voter bias me toward a system for which I have done all the homework? - Does my script that works fine in my dev system with relatively clean test data scale to an enterprise deployment and real-world loading? - How significant in improvement is needful to pay for the switching costs? Twice as good? An order of magnitude? Because I submit that, for all the virtues we informed types can see in RCV, it is prone to malicious attacks, e.g. flooding the ballot with a bunch of relatively unknown candidates. Furthermore, if there is any sort of contention involved, the complexities are going to lead to (likely unfounded) claims of tinkering. I'm a huge fan of the ditt-kuh-pow! (DTTCPOW, the Dumbest Thing That Could Possibly Work): - Make Election Day a federal holiday - Paper ballots - In-person voting except in strictly controlled, marginal cases (e.g. deployed military). Everyone trading security for convenience is misguided, in my opinion. You want to mark a ballot and cast it in secret so that, whatever you have to say to appease the shrieking neighbor, you and your ballot are as physically secure as possible. Staff the process so that pollbooks are <5k people. We get it done with ~20 people in my county for 13hrs on election day. ~240 precincts in the county. Not cheap, and yes, exhausting to staff. So, what? Staff, equip and support them and elections, can be a positive experience for all involved.

exmadscientist 2y ago
FWIW, after living in an all-mail voting state (WA), I never want to go back to voting in person. It is amazing having a couple weeks to mark a ballot at my leisure, do as much research as I want, and then just drop it in a box (or mail it, I guess, but the drop boxes have definitely been more reliable for me). But it's true I don't have a shrieking neighbor or brutal spouse to worry about.
- seniorivn 2y ago
  serious question, how do you know your vote is counted and is not intercepted/counterfeited before that?

KenSF 2y ago

My vote is 'any 1 election runoff system'[score, star, approval, ranked choice, ...]. Every 1ER is better than first past the post. It would be nice if vote nerds would shut the frak up about this one is better than that on. Open primaries; top 4 or 5 go through to the general; general uses any 1ER. Were I writing a law to put this in place, I would say we should revisit which 1ER after X number of years or Y voting cycles.

grumpymuppet 2y ago

I love the promise of ranked choice voting (and other schemes). Properly implemented it seems like it could be a magic bullet to balancing some of the political divide and drawing out candidates and ideas that would satisfy more than just the extremes... But, oh boy: we have trouble with simple plurality voting. How would you explain the outcome to people if it was implemented broadly?