supreme_loquat

> Only one person will win anyway, so disappointment about the outcome actually seems like the wrong focus vs eg satisfaction that you got to represent your preferences fairly.

Except that approval voting doesn't allow you to express your preferences very well, since there is very limited differentiation between candidates. I understand the appeal of approval voting since it's a very small change to the voting machines, voter experience, existing legislation, etc, but most people who want to express their preferences will be drawn to methods that actually let you do that most effectively. If approval goes head to head with IRV or STAR (the two other movements that seem to have some momentum) I would generally expect the voters to go with STAR or IRV, for better or worse.

Ah when you mention parallelizing I was assuming you were referring to the issue of requiring that ballots all be centralized in order to tally them for IRV, rather than summing at each precinct individually. The data that has to be in a central location for a condorcet method would only be O(n2) since it's just computed from the h2h table, I was not trying to discuss the complexity of actually computing the final results.

The biggest issue with a proposal like this is that a lack of any preference given whatsoever should not count positively towards a candidate. If someone labels candidate A as +3, candidate B as -3, and doesn't label candidate C, candidate C should not be given more preference than candidate B. People will either not understand the ramifications (they might not know someone and think that "no preference" is truly no preference when in reality it's positive preference), will forget, be lazy and not fill in some candidates, etc. I don't think that's a desirable trait since it's essentially ascribing a vote which the voter did not want. Of course if you want to make -3 (on a -3 to +3 scale) the default value assigned to "no preference" votes, perhaps that would be okay.

It's pretty common to not release the full CVR unfortunately. It makes the process much less transparent and also makes it harder to study how the different voting methods work in the real world.

> You could have each precinct count the first round

This is just centralized tallying with extra steps. You can't finish the first round without results from every precinct, that's the point. To finish the first round, you need to know who has the fewest first choice votes across the entire population, so each precinct would have to give the entire first choice votes distribution to the centralized location. But once a precinct knows the first choice distribution, by definition that means all the ballots have been cast and you also have all the second choice and lower ballot data as well, and eventually all the data will have to make its way to the centralized location so you may as well just give all the ballot data to the central location at one time (well, technically not all the ballot data is used because irv/ranked choice actually doesn't use all of it, but that's another discussion).

> On the other hand, ordinal systems have to be much more coordinated as they are not trivial to parallelize

I don't think this is true for all ordinal systems is it? Wouldn't most condorcet methods simply be tallied into a head-to-head table at each precinct and then combined centrally? It's mostly just IRV that has this issue since it's just iterated first past the post, and the order of elimination is important to know in each round before it can be continued. When all that's needed is a h2h table (no iteration) this isn't an issue.

Congress is totally broken, large bills like this are consistently shoved through and members of congress aren't given the opportunity to even read them before it's voted on. What's worse is they vote to pass them not even knowing what's inside, and what's even worse than that is that most of them couldn't care less about what's inside. They get told by the party leaders to vote for it and then they'll be taken care of, given party funding when reelection comes around, etc.

I highly recommend following Justin Amash if you want to hear all about how it's broken, his twitter is quite informative, he also has a podcast although many of the episodes are not related directly to politics. Even if you disagree with some of his political stances, it's astounding to hear straight from a former house member just how bad it is right now. No time to read bills, no floor amendments allowed by the speaker, if you don't vote how the leaders want you to then you're never given any committee assignments (especially bad given there's no opportunity to offer amendments on the floor), etc. And it's not just one party, Ryan may have officially killed the floor amendments but Pelosi has done a stellar job keeping them dead.

> 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.

You're just repeating the same points without engaging with anything I wrote. You're still making the assumption that the first choice votes are the most important, and ignoring the fact that people have other preferences that they marked as well.

> Peltola beat the field. In a FPTP system, she would have just won.

FPTP sucks and does not elect representative winners, that's exactly why we need to get rid of it. RCV is just iterated FPTP and as such, carries a lot of the same baggage and problems (while adding a lot of complexity and other new problems).

> He only wins when you eliminate all other choices except one opponent

No, this is exactly backwards. Begich is the only one in this race that can win without artificially eliminating someone (which is what RCV does by ignoring lots of information on the ballots). Peltota can only win by eliminating Begich as Begich wins in the head to head, in order to get this win lots of votes that voters expressed have to be discarded.

> Democratic second choice votes for Begich only exist because Democrats would prefer him to Palin. They don't want him so much as don't want her. And if they can't get Peltola, they much rather have Begich.

That's exactly the point, the voters farthest to the right prefer Begich to Peltota, the voters farthest to the left prefer Begich to Palin, and there's a few people in the middle who prefer Begich to both. Begich was the best candidate considering the whole field of preferences - admittedly a weak compromise candidate for some, but a strong compromise candidate for others and the first choice for many (and as I mentioned before, we can't know how many consider Begich a weak compromise vs a strong compromise candidate, anything you say about the sizes of those groups is just your personal speculation).

> The only reason there's noise about Peltola's win and RCV is because she's a Democrat. Look at all the hubbub being thrown about trying to say Begich should have won.

For some people, sure, but for those of us actually trying to push for positive change this has nothing to do with democrats or republicans. This has to do with RCV not electing the condorcet winner and having a non-monotonic election.

> You'd rather the person who came in third in the general win. And don't think people wouldn't complain about that.

Yes I would, if they win the head to head vs everyone else. You're still treating FPTP like some kind of gold standard. Sorry but that's not a good metric.

> STAR is RCV/IRV with extra steps that doesn't scale.

STAR has exactly 2 steps, a summation step and then a step to compare the top two winners. RCV is a whole iteration process and thus a lot more complex and a lot less scalable. STAR is also precinct summable, whereas RCV requires tallying in a central location which is another thing which makes RCV much less scalable.

> 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.

Beating everyone head to head is beating the field. The reason Begich wasn't picked by RCV is because he didn't have enough first choice votes. The problem with your analysis is that you are placing more value on a person's first choice than is warranted. You are assuming people care so much about their first choice winning that their lower choices are essentially irrelevant as long as their first choice is in the race. However, this is not necessarily the case. For example, what if someone liked their first two choices equally (or perhaps close to equal), but was forced by the ballot to rank one ahead of the other? That is a very different situation than if the voters did in fact have a very strong preference for their favorite over their second favorite, which is the situation you are assuming. Neither of these situations can be assumed from the data presented on a ranked/ordinal ballot.

With a cardinal ballot such as score or STAR, your argument could potentially hold water because we can glean the nuanced preferences from people's ballots. eg if someone ranked Palin 5, Begich 4, and Peltota 0, that's a very different story from Palin 5, Begich 1, Peltota 0, even though both of those ballots would look identical if they were squished into a ranked ballot format. The second case would support your argument pretty solidly since the voter didn't like Begich much at all, just a smidgen better than Peltota.

For the opposite scenario, consider if this race had been done with a 5 point score/STAR ballot where 40% voters give Palin 5, Begich 4, and Peltota 0, 40% voters give Peltota 5, Begich 4, and Palin 0, and 20% voters give Begich 5. It would be inexcusable not to elect Begich. Even though Begich was not the first choice for 80% of the population, an election like that would indicate such extremely strong support for him that you'll probably be inclined to point out that such an election would never happen in reality and I'm giving a contrived example. Which you're right, I'm not saying this is a likely scenario, I'm simply trying to illustrate how a compromise candidate could in fact be very strong, but RCV will still eliminate them if they don't have enough first choice votes. Placing a premium on people's first choice votes as RCV does is both unwarranted given the data represented on the ballots as well as harmful due to the issues it causes with monotonicity, not electing the Condorcet winner, etc.

If we want to insist on ranked ballots, we should be using a Condorcet method to count them.

Not sure I'm convinced. They'd have to have their heads totally buried in the sand to not know it's a problem, and as the saying goes, it is difficult to get someone to understand something when their salary depends upon not understanding it. If it makes it potentially harder for a democrat to get elected, why would they want to support it? That's one of the reasons I consider voting reform so important since it shows a critically severe character flaw if they aren't willing to risk losing their power.

It's not like Newsom is some outlier, just a year ago in San Diego there was an initiative to try and put IRV on the ballot so that the people of San Diego could vote on whether they wanted it or not. The initiative to put it on the ballot failed, only 2/6 democrats in the city council voted in favor of it. 1/2 republicans were in favor and the independent was in favor.

My personal theory is that if there's a strong majority, then the party on top would not be in favor of it. Hopefully we can break the cycle but it's a hard problem when the people most incentivized to vote for it are already the most marginalized.

I don't think I wrote that all democrats didn't want to fix this, it was simply an illustration that there are plenty of democrats that don't want to fix it or don't care enough to do so. You have to consider that CA could have passed this long ago, it's not like this was their first chance. The fact that it took them so long in the first place to even consider it doesn't speak great things about them. There's also the recall election, they could have run someone better if this was what they were really prioritizing but that clearly isn't the case. There's also plenty of charter cities that could adopt better methods that are likely democrat strongholds and they've also sat around for the most part (although there's obviously exceptions like the SF area, where interestingly enough Newsom also tried to stop it but failed).

edit: although really I hope all you took away isn't just that I don't like democrats. I don't like anyone against fixing the voting methods be they democrat, republican, green, libertarian, independent, or any other category I failed to mention. I just pointed out democrats because supposedly they are the majority in CA and like to claim that they support a healthy democracy. In the same way, I'm happy to work with (just about) anyone who wants to fix the voting system and hope they will make their voice heard. I think it is perhaps the most important thing we need to fix right now, and is one of the main criteria I personally look at when voting for officials.