Ranked choice. If no one has a majority, you eliminate the lowest vote getter and take the second choice of people who voted for that candidate. Repeat until there's a majority.
this post was submitted on 25 Jun 2024
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Ranked choice is one of the simplest ways to get a more representative, but to the question in the title it does tend to favour centrist parties. Progressives will vote for a centrist over a conservative, and a conservative will vote for a centrist over a progressive, so the centrist party will win almost every time.
It's still an improvement over the disaster of FPTP because it will at least elect parties that the majority can tolerate, but there is still a bias present.
That's not a bug. It's the entire aim of an electoral system.
The people who aren't the extreme ends of two poles and actually have policies the majority are in favor of are the people who are supposed to be in office. I shouldn't be choosing between "arrest people for using birth control" and "eat the rich and disband the police".
You also don't get progress in any direction when both parties are spending half their time unraveling everything the last group did.
I wouldn't call it a bug, just that a naive ranked ballot naturally favours the centrist voices. I don't even mean this in an extreme way: in Canada we basically have three centrist, neoliberal parties running parliament, and this would mean that the Liberals just win a majority almost every time. NDP voters generally won't vote Conservative, Conservative voters won't vote NDP.
This can turn into a bug because it ends up pushing other voices out: if the popular vote suggests equal support between left, right, and center candidates, you would typically hope the make-up of the government reflects that, but more likely it would look like a center majority. There are ways to mitigate this (large number of parties, electing multiple candidates on a ballot, proportional components of the vote, etc) but ranked choice on its own tends to be a centralizing force, not a way to get a more representative democracy.
Again, not a bug, and I definitely wouldn't call it worse than FPTP, just making it clear that it has its own biases that are worth taking into account.
If the Canadian Liberals thought it'd win them more elections, they would've done an election reform years ago.
...like they'd initially promised.
The center should be the people representing the country. There's a lot of room in there for a diverse, varied set of perspectives. The fact that 1/3 of the country hates the two extremes and is OK with the middle is exactly why the people in the middle are the ones who are supposed to be elected.
The middle will move over time as the electorate's value change. That's where progress happens. The 10% who are Neo Nazis should absolutely not have anyone make it into office. That's not what functional government is.
Then you end up with Ed Stelmach as leader.
Runoff elections seem the best from my view point
You end up with the actual preference of the majority best represented. You don't get put in a spot where you have to choose one of Trump or Clinton based on which extreme is least objectionable. You can vote for someone sane, then choose between the two extremes as your "worst case".
It allows moderates to actually be represented instead of primaried out of the race, then scared to be in the general election because they might spoil the race for their party's winner.
I explain my rationale in a response to the guy that I responded to. I realize it's a thin distinction, but I think it's an important one.
You know the alternate name for ranked choice? Instant runoff.
In your opinion, why does making everyone come out a second time produce better results?
I don't like the idea of having to vote multiple times, but it's better than ranked choice, as with ranked you can get a person in that the majority of people didn't vote for. If you have multiple rounds of just one vote cast, at least you're picking the person you want each time, rather than 'i guess this person is better than person X, but i really don't want him in.
As I alluded to, this is what happened in Alberta politics - we had 3 candidates for conservative leadership: two were very polar, and one guy was in the middle, and thus the guy in the middle won, but no one really wanted him to win. Conversely, if they had just voted regularly, the guy that won would have been kicked out since voting for him wasn't an option. Then you could run the thing again, and get a better split between the polar candidates.
I think we have a different understanding of ranked choice.
In your example, you have 3 candidates, and candidate 3 isn't very popular. He isn't many people's first choice. At the end of round 1, candidate 1 has 45% of the first choice votes, candidate 2 has 46% of the first choice votes, and candidate 3 has 9% of the first choice votes. Candidate 3 is then eliminated, and those who voted for him have their votes go to their second choice candidate. That should leave either candidate 1 or 2 winning. The only way he wins is if he had more first choice votes than one of the other candidates.
If someone who is everyone's second choice but no one's first choice wins, that sounds like approval voting or something similar, not ranked choice.
Edit: Looking at the referenced election, it looks like he was the most popular among the people who didn't want the 2 popular candidates. The first round was 8 candidates and a simple ballot. The second round was a runoff election with the 3 most popular candidates and a ranked choice ballot. He won the first round of that. No one had 50%, so instant runoff, but he also won the second round of that.
To avoid that situation, you would have had to change the run-off rules to only allow the 2 top people instead of the 3 top people. But it still was an in person run off that gave you the result you dislike.
Yes, we're talking about different things, it seems (also thanks for being civil in your reply). My apologies - your definition seems better than what my understanding was.
In any round though you only have 1 vote still, it's just collecting the votes ahead of time? The only thing you lose is knowing who is in each round in advance?
In your example, wouldn't the same candidates have been knocked out in each round regardless?
Again, see the chain, but my understanding was wrong. I was thinking ranked was you got multiple votes (1st preference, 2nd preference). That system sucks.
I think the ideal solution would be like selecting skills in an rpg. You get some number of points, say 10, and you can give as many or as few to each candidate as you want. If there's only one candidate you want you give them all your points, otherwise, you can do essentially the same thing as rank choice and give some to every candidate but different amounts
That way still ends up with candidates that you didn't vote for though, the ranked choice method means you always have a vote in each round.
There are good arguments for ranked choice and proportional representation IMO. The latter tends to favour more "fringe" parties getting representation, which usually isn't a bad thing.
The problem with proportional representation is that it assumes candidates are fungible.
It's bad enough that people vote for a party over an individual, and inherently limits the element of trusting the human being that should be the deciding factor in how people vote. Systematically assigning vote to a party rather than a person is much worse.
I see your point, but the reality is most people do vote for parties rather than people.
I imagine you would see more smaller parties in a PR system anyway, rather than the current big neoliberal tent parties.
You can't prevent that.
But any system that actively enforces party lines should be automatically disqualified as a legitimate electoral system. It strengthens the power of the dumbest, least informed voters at the expense of rational voters willing to actually understand who candidates are.
But when you have a problem, you complain to your representative that represents your area and knows all the details. That's a powerful thing.
In the UK at least there are a lot of seats that are swung by those holding them rather than their party.
That's basically the main downside I see to PR, finding out your local MP is from the monster raving loony party would be rather annoying. Saying that, I doubt he could do a worse job than the useless tory bint I currently have ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
There are versions of PR that mitigate this issue. Mixed-member PR sacrifices a little bit of precision in the proportionality, but limits the seats assigned to party lists to only some additional ones used to balance out the un-proportionality of the results. Most of the elected body is not from party lists.
You can also carry out a vote where you choose the party for the proportional vote, and then rank the members of that party. And the party assigns the seats they win to the candidates with the widest support.
That doesn’t solve the issue of people liking candidates from multiple parties though.
I've not heard of that one before, but I can see the reasoning behind it. Is there a name for the system that I can look up?
I’d love to help more, but it’s been years since I studied electoral systems. I’m not even sure if there is anyone currently using that system, or if it was just a theoretical election model.
Mitigation isn't good enough.
Any member of the body not being scrutinized by the entire relevant electorate and actually elected on the ballot is not OK.
You already got a bunch of responses on the ranked system so I'll mention other stuff.
There are many elements that go into the voting system. Here in Brazil if a candidate doesn't get over 50% of the votes we do a second poll with just the top two performers, which on top of counting every individual vote instead of grouping them by county, makes it a lot better than the US system. On the other hand, we don't have anything like the American primaries so we have no say over which candidates are going to run.
If the US election was like the Brazilian system, Trump wouldn't have won in 2016. If Brazil used the American system (with just two to three parties), Bolsonaro would probably not even have a party to run on in 2018.
Other important stuff is how to vote. Here there's a single day for polls which is a federal holiday and everyone has their own assigned location for voting, which is mandatory (but not really). If you're away from your designed location you can go to any other to fill a form or even use an app to notify that you can't vote. In some states it's also illegal to sell alcohol on election day. You're not allowed to do anything for a campaign while polls are open but it's also illegal for cops to arrest anyone (for anything) without flagrant. We can't vote by mail and we need to have an ID to vote. Oh it's also illegal to take a picture of your vote or bring people with you while you vote.
Polling locations are usually the closest school to your house or some other public building that is just a short walk away (except for very small rural towns). However, if you move and don't change your voting location within a few months or the election, you'll have to go back to where you lived before in order to vote - too many people never update it and have to go back to their home town every election (or just skip it).
All of those little things impact the end result because they can help (or prevent) people from voting. In the US, actual access to polls is already being weaponized by parties extensively, but here that is only now starting to be a thing.
Finally, there are the urns themselves. Here we have electronic urns with closed source code that can be audited by every party. At the end of the day each individual urn prints its own totals which are then displayed to the public and made available on the election website. It's not a perfect system and if (or more likely when) someone manages to hack it, they could easily change the result of an election, though I believe the systems in place are enough to at the very least expose that such a hack happened. The paper ballots used by the US on the other hand are much easier to fraud, but with much smaller impact to the total vote count (maybe high risk of impacting the results on key counties). Both systems still have a very large room for improvement in terms of fraud safety.
importantly the urns are not networked and the code is set in stone immediatly after an audit a few months before the election day. So, I really can't see how they'd be hacked
We have a similar system in California called the jungle primary—basically there are no party specific primaries (except for president because this system is incompatible with other state’s elections), and the top two advance to the general election.
There are a few issues though. If a candidate wins more than 50% of all votes in the primary, they win the election and don’t appear on the ballot in the general election along with the president. Since there is generally higher turnout for the general election rather than the primary, you can sometimes have a generally unpopular candidate win in the primary with 50+% of the small number of primary voters.
We also have issues with spoilers—if a bunch of similar candidates run, and all split the votes between them, it’s possible they don’t make the final ballot, even if any of them individually would have won the final election. This seems like a fringe issue until you realize that parties have actually supported lots of minor candidates on the opposing side in order to eliminate an otherwise dangerous challenger.
So overall it is somewhat better than first past the post but it still has significant issues. In general I think elections that select a single candidate are somewhat undemocratic by nature and we should think about ways to give the minority a voice but not the ability to shut things down. This may be a difficult balance to achieve but it’s still worth aiming for.
I like Condorcet methods.
This is a ranked method that's different from instant runoff, with its defining characteristic being that the winner would beat every other candidate in a two-way race. The biggest downside is that determining the result is more mathematically complex than other methods, which makes it harder to explain and might lead people to mistrust the result.
Condorcet methods benefit candidates few voters hate, which is the inverse of the current and past two US presidential elections. Given a situation where two dominant parties run widely unpopular candidates, a Condorcet method would create a very strong probability that any palatable third-party candidate wins, though over the long term a system using such a method probably wouldn't have two dominant parties.
Seems like an amazing system when you're voting between a small number of parties, but the Dutch House elections had hundreds of individuals, with 20 districts with imperfect overlap off individuals. It would be completely incomprehensible for humans to check things.
The Dutch system is open list proportional representation, with the twist that lists may overlap between districts.
I think Condorcet methods are better suited to voting for individual candidates. It's certainly possible to have multi-member districts (and I think that's a good idea), but probably doesn't pair well with proportional representation.
Some useful simulations for understanding many proposed voting styles, and the potential drawbacks of each.
Awesome tool, thanks for sharing. I wish they included STAR voting since I’ve become interested in that one.
It seems like every voting system has pros and cons, but I’ve become interested in STAR voting as it seems to have a nice blend of positive characteristics without the worst flaws of other systems.
It’s effectively a mix of score voting and instant runoff (ranked choice).
You can read more here: https://www.starvoting.org/
It hasn’t been tested much, mainly because it’s relatively unknown, so I’d like to see more real-world testing before I say it’s the best, but it’s definitely intriguing.
CGP Grey did a video on this subject a little over a decade ago.
Texagons are the bestagons.
Gimme checkboxes
I really like approval among single-winner methods. It's a clear improvement over plurality and encourages honest over strategic voting with 3+ candidates. Promoting candidate diversity without punishing voters for supporting them is the best way to help minor third parties become relevant.
Among ranked voting methods, I prefer Condorcet methods over others.
Instant runoff voting / single transferrable vote has some merit in the multi-winner proportional representation case, but isn't fit for purpose as a single-winner method.
Approval voting. Simplicity is essential in my opinion. You can read more about it here. https://www.rangevoting.org/RangeVoting.html
Slightly late, but I currently rewatch the lecture I talked about in my other comment. The interesting part starts roughly here:
https://youtu.be/T3-VlQu3iRM?feature=shared&t=2550
But really, the entire lecture series is quite worth a watch.
Watch this lecture series:
https://invidious.protokolla.fi/watch?v=BDqvzFY72mg
Iit's really insightful on many topics, and he also makes a point why the American two-party system is not as bad as it sometimes feels like (although of course not perfect either). I forgot which lecture exactly was about the voting systems, let me know if you watch it and find out.
https://freakonomics.com/podcast/americas-hidden-duopoly-2/
Listen to this then tell me what your choice is.
Double round robin debates, winner takes the presidency.
Whatever people choose, but with second turn. Too many times a fragmented vote makes it seem like a certain candidate has larger support when it is not the case