Doing some simple pre-Election Day research

[conuly]

One of the issues on the ballot in NYC this year is ranked choice voting (but only for primaries).

And it's... I mean, I'm going to vote for it, because at this point I think almost anything has to be better than the system we currently have, but I'm not a huge fan. I'd prefer a simple ballot where you can pick multiple candidates without ranking them, for two reasons.

First of all, I think the concept is just easier to explain and a bit more intuitive for people who haven't spent a great deal of time (or any time) considering voting options. We've ALL taken internet and magazine polls that allow you to pick more than one option per question.

Secondly, and equally importantly, I think a lot of people don't know all that much about candidates when they enter the booth. They know they like this one, they don't like that one, and they have varying but unspecific feelings about these ones. Asking them to rank them or do anything more complex than say "Yup, this one would be okay!" and "God, not that one!" is a bit of a stretch.

Also - only primaries? C'mon.

Comments

[jesuswasbatman]

According to most ranked voting systems, you don't have to rank every candidate. You can just put the ones you like first, second, and third, and ignore the rest.

[conuly]

Yes, but that doesn't mean I, or any random person, have a clear opinion on who I like first and second and third. Or if I do have a clear opinion, it might well be "Meh, one's as good as the other."

[delight]

I'm voting for it too and have identical feelings about only primaries.

I work closely with a NYC council member, though he is not my councilman as I live in a different district, and I feel like I should sit him down and actually ask WHY only primaries. (Not gonna say in a public post, but if you're curious whose ear I've got feel free to PM! Very very distantly relatedly, we are looking at possibly moving to your island in a year or two.)

[conuly]

North Shore, South Shore, or Mid-Island? Or not sure?

[delight]

Anywhere that I can commute in under two hours; I work in upper Manhattan, but my husband may be transferring to a mid-Staten Island site instead of his current Yonkers employment.

My coworker lives in Arrochar and gets here in an hour, so that's probably ideal for me and he can just drive to work ...

[mtbc]

I certainly agree. It's easy to understand how the winner is chosen yet it solves a few problems I face with the present pick-only-one system.

[conuly]

I suppose no system is ever going to be 100% perfect.

[hudebnik]

As it happens, that's been proven mathematically. However, some systems work better most of the time than others. Note that where the Wiki page refers to "ranked ballot systems", that includes the single-vote system (effectively, voters rank all the candidates and the system ignores all but their first choice) but not the approval-voting system.

[conuly]

Related to all this, have you seen today's xkcd?

https://www.explainxkcd.com/wiki/index.php/2225:_Voting_Referendum

(I almost always link to explainxkcd even when I suspect the person I'm linking to doesn't need it.)

[hudebnik]

Just saw it, and posted a link to it, before seeing your comment :-)

[movingfinger]

"Only primaries" sounds like a compromise was hammered out and that the intent is for this to fail. It's working well in other places. New Yorkers aren't stupider than any other set of voters.

[conuly]

No, but we're not smarter either. Maybe I'm just sour on ranking choices after doing high school admissions twice, but I'd really prefer either just a straight up "pick all that you like" system.

[ioplokon]

Yes, I don't know the extent to which ranked choice really cuts down on "strategic voting", either, since more mainstream candidates are almost always people's second or third choice. I do like the election system we have in California for non-presidential primaries (inexplicably deemed a "jungle" primary????), where you get every candidate on your ballot and then if there's a run-off in the general (bc no one got a pure majority), it's between the top two, regardless of party. And if you're No Party Preference, you can vote in Democrat presidential primaries.

I've lived in cities that use ranked choice/single transferable vote, and it's honestly not too much complicated. You can just mark your first choice only, if you have no preference on (or actively dislike) the others. Just like leaving elements of a ballot blank if you have no opinion, they'll still count it. Then again, we also have the Proposition system, so we're used to having a rather... involved voting process... (I also think ranked choice + the California primary system probably makes sense for people who have strong party preference - or strong party dispreference)

(also re: your last point, no kidding. One of my anarchist-adjacent friends voted for a white supremacist candidate once because his byline was "racial justice advocate". I think she learned her lesson there to at least google the people she wants to vote for)

[conuly]

re the first paragraph: We actually do ranking when we do school choice, so a. every parent of a public school student in at least middle school is, by now, utterly familiar with and tired of any system where you have to rank schools where your only preference is "I like this, but not more than any of the other ones". And b. year after year after year people don't get into their actual top choice school because they try to game the system despite being explicitly told "the only way to game the system is to rank the schools in order of your actual preference".

The only ranking I actually had for schools, and have for most candidates is, "this is my first choice, these are the ones I'm okay with, those are the ones I don't want". I'd actually be okay with a combo system, where you could designate a first choice candidate and that counts as two votes, and the others you pick each get one. But that'd be even more of a pain to explain, I suspect.

(also re: your last point, no kidding. One of my anarchist-adjacent friends voted for a white supremacist candidate once because his byline was "racial justice advocate". I think she learned her lesson there to at least google the people she wants to vote for)

Ai-yi-yi.

[killing_rose]

I have a book called Mathematics in Politics that I genuinely believe EVERYONE needs to read because it makes the politics involved in each type of voting method incredibly obvious. It also makes the variety of voting methods make sense in ways that they hadn't previously (and I'd *just* decided not to continue on with the poli sci major, so).

For reasons I don't remember a decade on, that class also involved (really delicious) cake and other baked goods in addition to snarling at proofs about whether ranked voting was better or worse than the electoral college method in general/in specific cases. The cake was really good. The math managed not to go totally over my head and as that was my last math class ever [I need 3 science/math classes, I did my 3 and never did any other], that's saying something.

[hudebnik]

I haven't seen that one; I'll look for it. Chaotic Elections: a Mathematician Looks at Voting discusses this stuff well.

Update: I looked on Amazon, and I don't see exactly that title. I see The Mathematics of Politics, The Mathematics of Voting and Apportionment: An Introduction, and Mathematics and Politics: Strategy, Voting, Power and Proof. Was it one of those?

[silveradept]

I like ranked choice in the way of making it possible for people to vote for the people they actually want first, and then eventually find a consensus candidate that gets elected.

[kareina]

My friends in Australia, where all elections are ranked, say that they generally only bother to learn which candidate(s) are on their "oh, god, no!" list, so they can put them last, and which are on their "yah, they'd be fine" list, and put them first, and the middle ones they just put the numbers in randomly.

[hudebnik]

Yes, I think in practice that's the way most people will use it, and that's fine.

No one person's vote is likely to determine the outcome of the election anyway; what matters is the opinions of a bunch of similar voters. If a whole bunch of voters have the same "they'd be fine" candidates, the same "oh god, no!" candidates, and the same "middle" candidates they rank randomly, the random stuff cancels out and the effect is the same as if they had ranked all the "middle" candidates equally. Ballot software can help with this by listing the names on each voter's ballot in a different random order, so somebody doesn't get an unfair boost by, say, being close to the front of the alphabet.

[conuly]

Am I mistaken, or is it the case that in Australia you have to rank all of them even if you don't care?

[hudebnik]

In a "pure" Borda or Condorcet count, you're supposed to rank all of them even if you don't care. That system is easier to analyze than one in which voters might fail to rank some of the candidates, but if you were to invalidate every ballot that didn't rank all the candidates, you would probably end up with a dismal voting rate. So I think most places (don't know about Australia in specific) allow you to leave some of the candidates un-ranked, and this is usually interpreted to mean they're all tied for last place in your opinion.

[thewayne]

I found out Las Cruces is doing ranked choice voting next week! It'll be interesting to see how it turns out. I'm not sure if I get to vote at all as I'm registered independent.

[redbird]

What I like about ranked choice voting is that if enough people are thinking "I prefer the Green candidate, but the important thing is to defeat the Republican," the Green candidate might be elected by enough ballots that say "Green 1, Democrat 2, Socialist Workers 3", plus a few SWP stalwarts who rank SWP 1, Green 2." It works well *combined with* strategic voting. If I was in the UK and trying to figure out who best to vote for to get an anti-Brexit candidate elected, this would let me rank the anti-Brexit candidates based on their positions on other issues.

I think ranked choice has worked pretty well in Minneapolis and St. Paul, where voters aren't asked to rank all the candidates (and in some elections can't): Minneapolis had a mayoral election with "rank up to 3 candidates, out of 35" because it was extremely easy to get one's name on the ballot.

[hudebnik]

Exactly: if one issue is the most important to you, you can use that to distinguish the top, middle, and bottom groups, and then within each group rank the candidates based on other issues.

As it happens, I think Brexit itself is a result of using a two-way vote to distinguish among multiple alternatives. Yes, 52% of British voters supported "leave", but they had a bunch of different ideas of what "leave" meant: no-deal, a hard border in Ireland, a hard border in the Irish Sea, Northern Ireland leaves the UK, Northern Ireland and Scotland both leave the UK, or "jump in a time machine and go back to 1970". I bet that no one of those would have gotten anywhere near majority support, but since they were all lumped together as "leave", they did. Moral: you can often determine the outcome of a referendum by how you present the question.

[hudebnik]

The "vote for all that you like" system is called Approval Voting, and it certainly has some advantages -- most obviously, the ballot is simpler to understand and fill out.

The main disadvantage is that it puts candidates' interests in conflict with those of their voters. It's generally in a voter's interest to vote sincerely for all the candidates whom that voter would find "acceptable", while it's in a candidate's interest to persuade voters to vote for that candidate AND NO-ONE ELSE, effectively reverting to the current single-vote system. And in places that have approval voting, you'll see billboards saying "Vote for Joe Schmoe and against all other candidates". To the extent that campaigns are successful in persuading their "tribes" to cast single votes, they've destroyed the whole point of approval voting.

My post of an hour ago goes into more detail on what problems ranked voting tries to solve and how various voting systems deal with them.

[conuly]

That's a good point, thank you.

[hudebnik]

And as it happens, today's XKCD is on the same subject.

[conuly]

LOL, great minds think alike!