Item — HN Reader

> we are dumbfounded by those who prefer Ranked Choice Voting.

Hello, I prefer RCV. Reasons:

- it is a stepping stone to proportional representation (achieved by adopting both RCV and multi-member districts), which is much more important than which single-winner voting system is chosen

- you need to be a fellow voting systems nerd to understand when you may want to vote tactically in RCV, so approximately zero people will vote insincerely

- it is really obvious that voting tactically is an option in approval voting, and so lots of people will vote insincerely and this will undermine the confidence in the voting system

- while single-winner RCV may not result in many more third-party winners (we need multi-winner RCV, i.e. proportional representation for that), it will change the kinds of winners for the two dominant parties, which is just as important. This point is always under appreciated.

- RCV has much more momentum behind it

2 comments

> - you need to be a fellow voting systems nerd to understand when you may want to vote tactically in RCV, so approximately zero people will vote insincerely

I don't think this is true. Consider a hypothetical voter whose sincere party preference order is "Constitution > Libertarian > Republican > Green > Democrat > Socialist > Communist". It doesn't take very big of a logical leap to say "it basically always seems to be a Republican or Democrat who wins, so for my vote to count the most, I should vote Republican > Constitution > Libertarian > Green > Socialist > Communist > Democrat."

> it is a stepping stone to proportional representation (achieved by adopting both RCV and multi-member districts), which is much more important than which single-winner voting system is chosen

There are proportional methods for STAR and approval as well, there's no reason they couldn't be the stepping stones from this perspective

> you need to be a fellow voting systems nerd to understand when you may want to vote tactically in RCV, so approximately zero people will vote insincerely

Yet that doesn't try and stop people from duping voters into eg only ranking Palin, even though RCV is basically the only system where there is practically 0 reason to not rank additional candidates. Your point mostly makes sense but in practice I wouldn't expect high amounts of tactical voting in STAR either for similar reasons. And from another perspective - if someone were to eg bullet vote in STAR to help their first choice win, is that really tactical voting, or just an honest vote/admission that they care so much about their first choice that all other opponents are equally bad? In my opinion, being forced to grapple with compromise would be good for society.

> it is really obvious that voting tactically is an option in approval voting, and so lots of people will vote insincerely and this will undermine the confidence in the voting system

Possibly, although I think bullet voting is much less common than people think it would be. That said, people want to be able to express preferences so I think the best use of approval is in primaries where the top two candidates proceed to the general. Outside of that I'm kind of meh on approval, and if people have to choose between approval vs RCV or approval vs STAR, I expect RCV/STAR to win almost every time.

> while single-winner RCV may not result in many more third-party winners (we need multi-winner RCV, i.e. proportional representation for that), it will change the kinds of winners for the two dominant parties, which is just as important. This point is always under appreciated.

Will it? With RCV the two dominant parties no longer have to worry about the spoiler effect, so there is even less incentive to reach across the aisle and receive influence from a third party than before. Whereas before you might want to take some token talking points from a third party and siphon some votes from them, with RCV you might be able to assume you'll get those voter's 2nd choices for free.

> There are proportional methods for STAR and approval as well, there's no reason they couldn't be the stepping stones from this perspective

Proportional approval voting is extremely confusing (and expensive) to compute the winner, people won’t accept a system that they don’t understand how it works.

> Yet that doesn't try and stop people from duping voters into eg only ranking Palin, even though RCV is basically the only system where there is practically 0 reason to not rank additional candidates.

It’s the first election where people used it so they will learn about that. Also some people might just want to vote for Palin and are indifferent after that. While I would fill out the entire ballot, most people won’t bother, and that’s fine.

> if someone were to eg bullet vote in STAR to help their first choice win, is that really tactical voting, or just an honest vote/admission that they care so much about their first choice that all other opponents are equally bad?

No it does not necessarily mean that, it could plausibly mean that they do have a second preference, but are afraid of giving them points so that they don’t overtake their first preference. Think of a Bernie, Hillary, Trump election where some Bernie voters don’t want to give high points to Hilary, even though they much prefer her to Trump, for fear of her beating Bernie. RCV allows them to confidently vote Bernie > Hillary > Trump and not worry about this problem.

> I think the best use of approval is in primaries where the top two candidates proceed to the general.

I think it would be best to ditch primaries completely and have everyone run in a multi-winner general election with RCV. So few people vote in primaries, so the highly engaged extremists influence the outcome for everyone in the general. Also why do I need to vote twice for the same position, it’s annoying. It would be nice to only need to vote in one election, the general.

> With RCV the two dominant parties no longer have to worry about the spoiler effect, so there is even less incentive to reach across the aisle and receive influence from a third party than before. Whereas before you might want to take some token talking points from a third party and siphon some votes from them, with RCV you might be able to assume you'll get those voter's 2nd choices for free.

It seems like you are talking about two things at once:

1. a major party moderating their position to get votes from the other major party

2. a major party taking a (more extreme?) position to get votes from a third party

When you say “reach across the aisle”, to me that means #1 above, i.e. Democrats and Republicans moderating their positions to appeal to the median voter. I agree that would be good and RCV does encourage that!

RCV doesn’t encourage #2, and I think that’s also a good thing.

I would love a robust multi-party system, but for that we really need proportional representation. Trying to get it with single-winner elections, no matter the system, isn’t a good approach.

> No it does not necessarily mean that, it could plausibly mean that they do have a second preference, but are afraid of giving them points so that they don’t overtake their first preference. Think of a Bernie, Hillary, Trump election where some Bernie voters don’t want to give high points to Hilary, even though they much prefer her to Trump, for fear of her beating Bernie. RCV allows them to confidently vote Bernie > Hillary > Trump and not worry about this problem.

Well that's the whole point I was making. In STAR if they really don't like Hillary but prefer her to Trump, they can vote Bernie 5, Hillary 1, Trump 0. Yes, they've very marginally increased the likelihood that Hillary reaches the runoff instead of Bernie, but in doing so they have ensured that in the runoff their vote will contribute to Bernie over Hillary or Hillary over Trump (depending who reaches the runoff). If they aren't willing to give up even one point on a 5 point scale in order to express that preference in the runoff, I'd argue that they have essentially admitted that their preference for Bernie to win is so strong that it overrides any of their other preferences. It's just an honest vote. It could perhaps be a miscalculated vote if they don't understand the implications of that kind of vote, but if they understand and still vote as such then it's honest.

If anything I consider this an advantage of STAR over RCV. Political polarization has gotten to a ridiculous point and we should be encouraging finding common ground. STAR helps facilitate this kind of dialog on a societal level while RCV implicitly tells people they can have their first choice without needing to find any common ground with other camps. In RCV there is not even the option to have your lower choices counted alongside your first choice in any given elimination round. STAR gives voters the ability to choose whether to compromise or not.