Animated Voting Methods

There is a video demonstrating the simulations posted on the OPs reference. [VIDEO] The video was created by the Equal Vote Coalition. They also have some good information on their site. [LINK]

I always recommend this pair of videos when discussing STAR voting vs other alternative systems. The first video is an easy-to-follow explanation of how spoiler effects can happen in both plurality voting and IRV [1]. In the second [2], the guy who created Star voting applies Ka-Ping Yee's methods to Star voting and animates it side-by-side with alternative systems to show its performance. [1] [LINK] [2] [VIDEO]

Variants of STAR voting can do Proportion Representation. There's no need to stick to Ranked Choice just for that. The best research out there indicates STAR as the best, and it works best by that simulation you describe as well. Here's some references: The exact same approach as your first link: [VIDEO] [LINK] [LINK] The only Ranked Choice approach anyone is promoting is Instant Runoff which discards preference votes relatively arbitrarily. Your second choice vote never counts if they happen to get eliminated in an earlier round than your first choice. If you have trouble following how IRV unfairly counts votes and even leads to bad outcomes, this simple demonstration may help make it clear: [LINK] Now, there are some options like Ranked Pairs that are at least arguably okay, but that's far more complex to understand and to tabulate and nobody is actually promoting it in real use.

For a more interesting experiment Fargo had an election with Approval Voting[0]. Unfortunately RCV (IRV) doesn't solve many of the problems that it claims to do. One of the claims is that IRV prevents spoilers, which is objectively false[1][2]. We're pretty interested in the Favorite Betrayal Criterion to prevent this[3]. We also see that IRV has a fairly poor voter satisfaction efficiency (VSE)[4][5]. It really feels like people just watched the CGP Grey videos on election science and dug no further. Even Arrow himself said that cardinal voting (Approval, score, STAR) is probably the likely answer. They also tend to be much simpler as they only are single rounds and resistant to people accidentally "ranking" two candidates equally (which you might actually favor two candidates equally and these methods let you express that). [0] [LINK] [1] [LINK] [2] [LINK] [3] [LINK] [4] [LINK] [5] [VIDEO]

Simple answer: The math says so [VIDEO] Longer answer: cardinal systems (the generalized form that approval is part of) is able to capture more information about voter preference. It is easiest to see this with something like range voting. You may be familiar with a question like "Do you agree or disagree with x statement?: strongly disagree, disagree, neutral, agree, strongly agree." That is range. Approval would be "Do you agree or disagree with x statement?: Disagree, agree". Conversely FPTP would present you many statements and you have to pick the one you agree with the most, even though you may agree with many in the list. You can probably see here that you are actually able to capture a fair amount of preference information through this, thus allowing to elect representatives that more accurately represent the population as a whole.

I'm not sure that's a necessary prior. This also isn't a binary condition (informed vs uninformed) but rather a spectrum. One can be reasonably informed (or worse! Misinformed!) and still not vote optimally, but would trend in the direction. Because of this spectrum it is reasonable to also want to handle strategic voting well. Especially because there's nothing better to discourage strategic voting than to make it not very useful (think why would you perform this adversarial attack if it isn't effective?). While the Condorcet criterion itself is nice it is far from the most important (cardinal systems are going to do a good job here). VSE really is measuring the MSE distance between true voter preference and candidate policy. But there are other criteria that matters. Simplicity is one, as it allows for transparency and voters to understand the system. Ranked systems typically fail the favorite betrayer. This includes RP and Schulze (the most popular Condorcet methods, and what I assume you are specifically referring to). But also consider factors like: expressiveness, spoiling, monotonicity, scaling (do ballots look the same?), and momentum. It is really easy to get caught up in a single metric, but the difficulty of voting is that there are a lot of metrics that matter and you really have to do a lot of tuning. But I'll tell you that the researchers themselves, including Arrow, typically prefer cardinal systems because of the combination of criteria. [LINK] [VIDEO]

Ranked Choice Voting is not really a good idea. It has very strange unintuitive behavior. Doing Score based voting is just much better and arguably simpler and less work. I specially like the Star-Voting, where they do a runoff at the end to cover some extra cases. They also have a few variants for multi-winner and representational voting. Its also much more familiar for people from real live, like online review. [LINK] P.S: Wow a lot of down-votes. RCV is just the alternative that got the most marketing, but once you start looking into the different systems I really don't understand people can stick with RCV just because its slightly better then the system before. If you are gone invest all this effort in improving the system, why not go to something easier and objectively better. This video shows the issue very well (one of the people involved in Star voting made it): [VIDEO]

RCV doesn't solve what is claimed in the article. It is interesting since countries that they give as examples are clear evidence of this. (Yes, I'm going to advocate cardinal systems like Approval, Range/Score, and STAR) > More moderate candidates. RCV doesn't encourage this at all. Australia is a clear example of this. In the house Liberal and Labor (the two major parties) control 85% of seats. The next major party (National) is part of a coalition with the Liberals and this sums to 95%. Things are only slightly better in the senate. Look at any country that uses IRC/RCV and you'll see a similar pattern. The system didn't encourage more parties and more moderates, Australia still has divided politics like America. As to the more parties, I have an alternative explanation. They use a parliament, which uses proportionate representation. Don't buy it? Go look at countries with parliaments and don't have IRV and you'll find similar distributions. We also need to recognize that in America our parties are closer to coalitions in other countries out of the necessity. I'm not sure how anyone can look at someone like AOC or Sanders and think they are the same "party" (by other country norms) as Biden or Pelosi (similarly on the Republican side, though Trump caused a consolidation). > ranked-choice voting can drastically reduce the possibility of spoilers. Yes, but no. It reduces spoilers when a candidate is not going to win anyways (e.g. Jo Jorgensen spoiling Trump). But this does n

The first link there does actually compare against ranked choice. It is just called IRV. There's a larger comparison that includes more types of ranked choice (also called "ordinal") here[0]. Though I particularly like this animation[1]. I'll also add that there is a lot of nuance to voting and VSE isn't everything. There's a lot of factors to consider including: how do strategies work? Is it scalable? Can it easily be counted and/or verified statistically? How easy is it for voters? How effective are (strong and weak) spoiler candidates? And many more questions. For the most part cardinal methods (like Approval) fair better on all these accounts. There is a slight tradeoff to VSE. Note STAR in [0] has a slightly lower VSE than RP/Schulz (ranked), but a tighter grouping (better vs strategies). But also STAR is more complex for voters and counting than Approval is (I'd still argue STAR is easier for voters and counters than ordinal systems). So these are the types of tradeoffs you're making [0] [LINK] [1] [VIDEO]

This is actually completely backwards. IRV favors extremists whereas approval voting tends to find the most broadly appealing candidate. [VIDEO]

> The idea that a single candidate can better represent a smaller (and usually gerrymandered) district than a larger number of diverse candidates in a larger district flies in the face of everything we know about real democracies and party systems. This is simply not correct. Elections are a form of statistical sampling, and with a good single-winner voting method, all voters of every stripe affect the centroid position, "tugging" it left, right, etc. Which you can see graphically depicted here. [VIDEO] > Again, theoretical claims against real world experience. You're not citing any real world data that contradicts my argument. > I've experienced polarization in AV to the point where center becomes a wasted vote, and people are incentivized to support one of the two dominant slates. If you mean "alternative vote" (known to experts like myself as "Instant Runoff Voting"), note that I'm not advocating that. I'm advocating cardinal methods such as score voting and approval voting. Which tend to elect broadly appealing centrists. [LINK]

> There was a site posted to HN years back that mathematically analyzed a ton of these voting schemes, I cannot seem to find it on Google but it was some sort of hybrid scheme that apparently has the best overall outcomes. Do you remember what was on it? I'll just drop a few links [LINK] [VIDEO] [LINK]

RP has a resolve time of O(n4) so I'm not sure that's a method you want to argue for under a thread where (an even lower) complexity led to a critical mistake. It would be naive to maximize VSE over all other criteria. I cannot stress enough that there are no optimal systems and that we cannot look at criteria independently. > I don't understand how you don't understand the argument. Because pure honesty is never an optimal strategy? I'm not aware of a system where that's the optimal strategy. But as we showed here in range, the best strategies are some form of honesty. The dishonest part is that you rescale, which I don't think most people would be upset about. What is frustrating to me is that you appear (I'm willing to admit a misread because these conversations are difficult and it is clear you're primed on my position given your usual suspects statement) to be ignoring identical strategic issues in ordinal systems. But I've also stated pretty clearly why I have a preference of cardinal systems. It is because I care a lot about the resolve complexity (the thread topic is a good example), monotonicity (something IRV/RCV fail (RP and Schultz pass but fail the prior criteria)), favorite betrayer/strong spoiler effect (again IRV/RCV fails), and an important factor is the embedding aspect. That the distance between all preference is not identical. We just can't have as richly expressive latent embedding as we can in a rated system. This has a lot of benefits that I think we ne