So once all the dust has settled, it actually does look like RCV elected the wrong person via center squeeze. https://www.reddit.com/r/EndFPTP/comments/x9oupk/2022_alaska_special_general_vote_breakdown/ What this means: there was a candidate -- Begich -- who would have won any head-to-head election against his opponents. This is the Condorcet winner, and while it doesn't always exist, it's widely acknowledged that if it does exist, a voting system should pick it. This version of RCV did not do so. Additionally, if 2913 Palin voters that preferred Begich to Peltola betrayed Palin by strategically ranking Begich 1st he would have won instead of Peltola. This is a classic spoiler effect under RCV. If Peltola were to have gained the support of 5825 Palin voters, she would have lost to Begich. Yep, if she'd gotten more votes, she would have lost. Arguably even worse, if 5825 Palin > Begich > Peltola voters had stayed home, their 2nd choice instead of their 3rd choice would have won. We don't like voting systems that penalize participation. If 5828 Palin > Begich voters, 2915 Begich voters, and 2914 Peltola > Begich voters were removed from the election, Begich would have won. But if you counted just those removed votes, Begich also would have won. This is inconsistent. Two winning scenarios added shouldn't add up to a losing scenario. This is 5 different types of failure in a single election, culminating in a center squeeze. I may like the winner, but the fact is there was a spoiler effect that RCV proponents claim doesn't exist. It's there, but somewhat chaotic. Should Alaska go back to plurality? Hell no. But if reformers don't push for a different voting method, say, approval or score, it's likely people will demand a more comprehensible system if they're going to have to vote strategically anyway, and that's going to default to plurality. TLDR: there was a Condorcet winner; it was Begich; he wasn't chosen, and there are several awful counterfactual vote totals that will make people real suspicious of RCV and rightly so.
Ranked choice voting will still be better for voters in the long run. It worked so well in Vermont, politicians attempted to abolish it. But, voters weren't having it and it's back as of May 2022
I believe it was the 2007 mayoral election in Burlington that failed in a very similar fashion, which led directly to its abolition. We’ll see how long it lasts here. It’ll be harder in this case to repeal, but I think it will be in the next couple years.
One candidate who would have lost if she’d gotten 5825 more first-rank votes from Palin. That’s not a good system. More to the point, the ostensible point of RCV is to allow more choices without spoilers. It utterly failed at that here, and it’s going to put people off non-plurality systems which is very bad.
Thanks for this. I’m gonna have to vote on either RCV or Approval in Nov. Was leaning towards RCV as I am more knowledgeable of it and it is what the council passed and I generally default to them over initiatives but am now gonna have to dig into it. Voters will first decide on Question 1, asking whether either of the two proposed voting systems should be adopted. Voters would then decide on Question 2 to choose between Proposition 1A (Initiative 134) for approval voting or Proposition 1B (City Ordinance 126625) for ranked-choice voting. Voters opposed to adopting a new voting system who vote ‘no’ on Question 1 can still vote for their preferred option in Question 2. If the first question is approved by a majority of voters, the option receiving the highest number of votes would be adopted. https://news.ballotpedia.org/2022/0...ked-choice-voting-for-city-primary-elections/ Does the fact that this is for the primary, not the general change things? All of Washington has an open ‘top two’ or jungle primary where there is one list for all voters and the top two regardless of party go on to the general. This will just use RCV or Approval voting narrow the field down to the two who go on to the general.
Yeah if I had the choice I'd pick STAR over Score over approval over RCV over FPTP. That said, this is apparently only for primary elections, which distorts things in ways that are not entirely clear without more info. For instance, is it FPTP in the general? Is it an open primary? Ratfucking becomes much easier in open approval voting primaries and then you could get extreme candidates in a plurality general, which means a result as far from the median voter as you can get. When deciding, watch the general election interactions carefully!
Yeah, see my edits. All of WA has open ‘top two’ or ‘jungle’ primaries. The top two go to the general where it is FPTP. So this would only pick the top two who will face off in the general.
Turns out there exists a Nash Equilibrium for pickiness in approval voting. https://quantimschmitz.com/2022/10/...-you-vote-for-in-an-approval-voting-election/ Even more surprising, it’s “however picky everyone else is”. That’s not a terrible place for it to be. In particular it shows that “bullet voting” (always voting only for your favorite candidate, equivalent to FPTP) is less likely to get you what you want than being less picky. That’s a pretty big finding and makes me feel better on a theoretical level about approval voting. Still, it’s a numerical finding via Monte Carlo simulation. It’s not terribly intuitive, so I don’t know if real voters will actually converge to it.
@Order2Chaos Not a callout but I just know that like me you also support other than FPTP systems and unlike me you are decently intelligent. https://bsky.app/profile/trryjhrrs.bsky.social/post/3l4wpqppn2h2v To quote the great American Philosopher Michael Gerard Tyson: Everyone has a plan until they get punched in the face. Portland has been punched in the face with reality and… not responded well. This cannot be the way. How do we make RCV understandable to voters and not… this…
I mean the way they do it in civilized countries like Australia is they don’t assume that the lowest common denominator voter is a complete illiterate and just have a box next to each name where you write numbers one through six or whatever. Sadly, the powers that be have decided we can’t have nice things.
This is what they look like. It's always fun each election deciding who you give the dishonour of being last.
Not a completely perfect system, but one which I'm pretty proud of overall. A lot of redundancy and openness built into the processes at every step which means there is a lot of trust in elections.
Ah…. Just realized that hand counting is probably a lot easier when it is just one race. I’m guessing y’all don’t have three to four pages of voting on everyone from your local mosquito control district board of supervisors to Supreme Court (state) judges and on everything from funding your local water conservation district, to 911 update special levy, advisory votes on every tax measure Olympia passed that session, initiatives, referendums and everything in between. I think my last ballot had around 30 different things I voted on.
The AEC handles Federal Elections, from high level management to running individual polling locations on election day. They're funded by the federal government. We don't vote directly on as many things no, and they are organised to not happen at the same time. In a federal election I would typically vote for: Local representative to Federal Parliament Senate candidates to represent the state in the national Senate. Any plebiscite or referendum questions that are also happening at the same time. While they will occasionally align with a Federal Election, it's also common for these to be raised separately on a voting day dedicated to them. In a state election I can vote for: Local representative to the state Parliament. Candidates to be part of the state legislative council (basically a state government Senate) State referendum questions in theory, but I've never witnessed one, they're pretty rare. Council elections: Election of candidates to the local council, who are responsible for things like rubbish collection, maintenance of local parks, etc.
Potentially if you're using simple yes/no/mark one option voting, but I'd be very surprised if that could be shown to be the case for RCV.
Machines do have a better ability to properly read things, so even that would be more accurate if the proper systems were used. Humans make mistakes much easier than machines, especially at monotonous tasks like counting.
They might be using bad methods for machine counting in RCV elections. If you were using handwriting there might be trouble with mechanical counting, but if you were to use a method that does not rely on a symbol that could be written many different ways by different people the machine would be better at tallying up the choices. There is a reason why electronic databases are better than handwritten books in accounting.
I do think machines would have more trouble with a "write a number next to each candidate" type system ... but because humans would have trouble too, I think it's really problematic to design ballots that way anyway. Depending on a person's handwriting, 1 and 7 can look similar, 4 and 7 can look similar, sometimes 3 and 5 can even get confused. I've read forms where I had to do some detective work (for instance, looking at how the person wrote their zip code as a comparison point) to decipher a phone number. And there would be a disproportionate impact on some groups of voters, too -- people with disabilities and older people would be especially likely to have their votes misread. A lot of people develop palsy or a tremor with age, and can make their intent clear by filling in a bubble a lot more easily than by writing a number.
In StealYourFaceworld machines are infinitely vulnerable to Democratic hacking and tampering, with suspicious Black people carrying USB sticks full of GOP votes also being of particular concern.
This is why you create a ballot to be counted by machine which is going to be far faster and accurate than a human counting system. It is a lie that hand counting is the best way. There is a reason why banks and casinos do not rely on hand counting coins and force multiple hand counts by human dealers.
