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PaperclipPerfector  2mo ago (text post)   4400 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for June 16, 2024

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Something I recently noticed - increased push to implement ranked choice voting everywhere. What is more strange, it always seems to be Dems promoting it and Republicans opposing it. My question is - why? First of all, why push it now, and second, why the partisan divide? I mean, if it, say, gave advantage to the minority party, then you'd expect minority Rs push it too somewhere. But it's not what I am seeing.

The press tends to have a "no enemies to the left" policy where even the most radical leftists are seen as well meaning but misguided. More broadly this view seems to be common in a lot of university grads.

So the right has an inherent disadvantage in communications. They have to spend effort talking up their candidate and attacking their opponent to get to the point that the left gets to for free. Smaller right wing candidates tend to not do well because they don't have the resources or institutional support to get positive exposure.

If the right starts winning then the left can shift it's support from the centre leftist to a farther leftists who's already branded as a "good person".

So for the left it tends to let the press blow wind into multiple sails, while the right has to face cannons from multiple angles.

Additionally no one has the time to do a deep dive on multiple candidates for things like congressional races. Voters won't know much about candidates besides their ethnicity, so it promotes racial politics.

IRV won't really reshuffle the political landscape if implemented. Okay, maybe some of the blue seats in solid blue states will flip green, but I doubt the Libertarian party has enough popular support to flip any seats yellow without charismatic nominees. There is a possibility that these first Green congressmen boost their party's visibility to a level when enough people across the country vote G>D>R in the next election, but I wouldn't bet on it.

That's why the Democratic party is free to promote IRV. As others have said, they are the party of trying new things, so it fits their profile.

Things like multi-member districts where two top parties get their candidates in, or a German-style "pad the parliament with party list candidates to match the national popularity of the parties" system are reforms that really challenge the current political landscape and that's why no one on the DNC/RNC proposes them.

The seemingly now-universal popular habit of calling Instant Runoff Voting (a term that specifies one particular voting system) by the name Ranked Choice Voting (a term that applies to IRV, but also Condorcet methods, STV in multi-winner elections, a ton of other methods, and I guess technically even plurality voting), is weird to me. How did that get started? Long ago when I first looked into better voting systems, it seemed like nobody could make that mistake: people who had also looked into better voting systems wouldn't mix up those terms because they'd get it right, and people who hadn't looked into better voting systems wouldn't mix up those terms because they didn't know the terms.

Are we just at the far end of a branching/viral game of telephone, here, where person A carefully explained about tactical voting and Smith Sets and the DH3 scenario and on and on, but persons Z1 through Z1000 barely managed to get "ranking good" and "plurality bad" out of all that?

My personal beef with IRV is that it claims to make it safe to vote for 3rd parties, but only does so if the 3rd parties have no chance of winning. I'm not sure whether the possibility of "tricking" voters into an untactical split vote would be likely to hurt the Democrats or Republicans more, though; I think Democrats are just more pro-IRV right now because when you feel in control you feel like it's safe to trust wonkish ideas, whereas the minority party has more cause to fear that complications are a way to hide trickery.

I'm a fan of Approval Voting, where the optimal tactics are "look at the two front runners and vote approval for the better of the two as well as anyone you like more than them", not much harder to understand than plurality's "look at the two front runners and vote for the better of the two", and where there's pretty clearly still no trickery hidden in "the person who gets the most votes wins". It's not as good as a Condorcet method in the absence of tactical voting, but since there won't be an absence of tactical voting I think it makes sense to settle on something where the tactical-voting failure states are as benign as possible.

How did that get started?

I don't know but I haven't seen any popular discussion of it that didn't call it that. So I'm not about to piss against the wind here...

The seemingly now-universal popular habit of calling Instant Runoff Voting (a term that specifies one particular voting system) by the name Ranked Choice Voting (a term that applies to IRV, but also Condorcet methods, STV in multi-winner elections, a ton of other methods, and I guess technically even plurality voting), is weird to me. How did that get started?

It's an intentional propaganda campaign by FairVote, which is the only at all effective organization pushing for alternative voting systems in the United States. They actively fight against any voting system other than Instant Runoff Voting (or Single Transferable Vote for multi-member districts, but the US doesn't really do those) and intentionally use that language to obscure the discussion.

It's a little hard to take FairVote as good-faith actors given they're acting exactly how you'd design an organization to prevent the adoption of any alternative voting systems by pushing the worst choice for an alternative voting system and bad-mouthing all of the others.

It's a perennial topic that tracks the election cycle, can't say I've noticed it getting particularly more air time this go around. While there have been a few higher-profile instances of election swinging against dems seemingly contingent on certain third party candidates, I don't think it would broadly advantage one party over another in any enduring sense. As long as gun rights and tax are highly salient and polarised (and as weed becomes less salient), I'd imagine most libertarians would preference the GOP even as Green party voters would preference the dems. The net result would likely be a wash, and the bigger impact would be intra-party, e.g. moderating dems by letting them shed extreme positions to a clientalised periphery.

So I don't think the partisan appeal of RCV/IRV tracks strategic advantage necessarily and is mostly just borne by cultural affinities where lib educated types are more interested in theorycrafting on the government as an institution and happier to knock over fences doing so.

The fact that it's largely an affectation of educated wonk types rather than strategically advantaging dems qua dems means that it's actually one of those issues that may be easier to implement obliquely/non-politically in a cross-partisan way, to the extent that wonkish types are relatively more present in the republican electeds than their base.

and the bigger impact would be intra-party, e.g. moderating dems by letting them shed extreme positions to a clientalised periphery

This is probably a good explainer for the partisan split- extreme views hurt democrats and they’d like to get away from them, but republicans have no way of doing that.

Yeah I don't really have a coherent opposition to RCV per se, but nevertheless am weakly opposed, just because it's the loud people who tend to love terrible, expensive ideas who seem most excited about it. If all these obnoxious college kids like it, my stupid monkey brain tells me there must be something wrong with it. Like the Radiohead of public policy.

I have a non-monkeybrained reason to oppose it - I know that my species, including myself, are a bunch of monkeybrains, so we react angrily when we don't understand something and think we're getting tricked. In my view, elections do not improve governments by selecting high quality leaders, but by increasing the legitimacy of power, making people feel as though they at least have a say in what goes on. To that end, having the absolute simplest system that everyone can understand is immensely beneficial. As a result, I am broadly against anything that seems convoluted or that people could plausibly interpret as unfair. Even if RCV is actually a good idea for some reason, very few people can model it effectively and people absolutely will feel like their opponents just devised a system to cheat the first time that someone gets the most first-place votes and loses anyway.

Even if RCV is actually a good idea for some reason, very few people can model it effectively and people absolutely will feel like their opponents just devised a system to cheat the first time that someone gets the most first-place votes and loses anyway.

In some ways, you could even say that the purpose of all these complicated systems is to ensure that the guy with the most votes loses.

In my view, elections do not improve governments by selecting high quality leaders, but by increasing the legitimacy of power

Big reason I'm a fan of compulsory voting (though I think it does moderate politics as well)

More zero information extremely lazy people voting? Not sure how it would solve any of the problems.

Majority R's have floated it in Georgia, where libertarians(who can be expected to lean R, especially in a state like Georgia with a democrat party blacker than Africa) throw races which matter into a runoff regularly enough to want a 'R's automatically win a runoff' button.

Elsewhere in the country, republicans might have bloody primary fights, but unite behind a general candidate even if he's definitely not the favorite. This means that normalizing third party voting is bad for republicans, especially in minority heavy districts. In Texas, whose politics I know best, there's a contingent of well to the right republicans whose support is absolutely necessary to keep winning. Convincing them that voting constitution or libertarian is a valid option would throw races to the democrats where normally republicans are guaranteed to win. Conversely, local democrats have little interest in a third party because they're heavily poor minorities; the green party gets its support from college educated whites. That's also why Texas abolished straight ticket voting: a straight d button was getting pressed too much and republicans were thought likely to manually select the republican in every race.

Convincing them that voting constitution or libertarian is a valid option would throw races to the democrats where normally republicans are guaranteed to win.

Presuming they preference republicans ahead of dems, what is the assumed mechanism for this?

In 55% R districts where democrats select D as their top choice?

That shouldn't matter, even if you have e.g. 45% D, 30% R, 15% L, 10% C in first preferences, minor parties get eliminated first and their votes are added to the R tally.

The failure mode of IRV looks more like 45% D, 10% R, 25% L, 20% C where the Rs are the voters sufficiently disengaged and ignoring third parties to not put down a second choice or write D as a second choice.

In other words, if almost everyone selects different obscure third-parties they really want first and the realistic choice second, then IRV gets nonsense results because the realistic choice gets eliminated even though everyone expected their votes to get reallocated to them. In practice this isn't a real problem because no one proposing IRV seriously expects any meaningful votes outside of the two-party duopoly.

Democrats are already likely to be opposed to the electoral college and to be more vocally opposed to gerrymandering, so I imagine that plays a minor effect.

Then, I think some of the main factors that make Democrats more suspicious of ideas are if they're Republican-coded, in some way hurt any of the groups they care about, or if they seem in some way to be good for corporations. This is none of those. Rather, it's supported by nerds experts.

Republicans are less likely to trust ivory tower ideas, so there's a little more suspicion.

Of course, on both sides, the direct incentives for the leadership is against, as shaking up the electoral system is usually bad for getting reelected, but the fact that such systems are genuinely better means that they occasionally can be implemented at some level.

The DNC always appears to support RCV unless it's an election year. Then they're hell-bent on telling people to vote for the lesser of two evils. Why not campaign on RCV and voting blue?

It's currently an election year, and there's plenty of news articles about RCV.

Dems currently are the ones more commonly pursuing the narrative that everyone actually agrees with them and if they don't it's because they've been tricked or because they're presented with a bad false set of choices.

A quixotic affection for alternative voting methods reflects this theory: if only we had the correct voting system, then the REAL preferences of voters would find their way out, and Democrats would win.

Think of it as an attenuated form of mistake theory: if only we properly captured voter preferences, the correct candidates would win. There's no problem with our positions, or even how they're marketed, only the system.

My cynical take is that ranked choice voting is preferred by the more "wonkishly inclined" because it's less intuitive/provides more opportunity for gamesmanship than simple FPTP or Approval voting.

The partisan split is thus explained by the majority of journalists and academics being Democrats, and the Republicans being immediately suspicious for precisely the same reason.

It also makes a certain amount of sense in that (in the US at least) the left has been more prone to schism than the right and thus alternatives to FPTP can be reasonably characterized as helping the left more.

Oh, yeah, I really, really like Approval voting. Kind of has a lot of the FPTP upsides in being very intuitive, feeling fair, few startup costs, easy public education, prevents shenanigans a lot of people dislike, what's not to like? Very little wonkery going on. You just say, vote for everyone you like, and that's it! Done!

Sure. It can hurt if you have a "true favorite", but if they are your true favorite, you can always just vote for them alone, easy. If you like one more than others, but are okay with others, that's kind of fine, it still does what it says on the tin. And if most people end up just doing single votes, that's mostly the current system, so doesn't feel like a big loss. It's also almost as expressive as IRV or other RCV formats with fewer downsides. The only major downside I can think of is that it makes it slightly harder for vote-counting, in the sense that we can clearly see by published totals if something is fishy. But even there, the security really isn't much worse than the current system, and in practice I think election offices are going to be releasing the overall ballot numbers anyways.

Why would journos/academics prefer gamesmanship?

Personally, I don’t care about RC vs. approval vs. other wonkish competitors. They’re all better than FPTP!

The important part is picking a rallying point, and RCV has some early momentum. We can hash out the details once we’ve reduced the influence of a two-party system.

Because expanded opportunities for gamesmanship increases thier power/status relative to the stereotypical "low information voter"

it's something that came out of the academy

Did it? It has been in place for over 100 years in Ireland ever since the UK wanted to boost the minority Unionist vote, maybe this all started with an academic paper but it seems like the academy got interested in something that already existed.

But adding on to that, ranked choice voting is something popular in Europe (which means +10 interest among Democrats and -10 interest among Republicans),

Not really, although I agree that is the vibe. "Ranked choice voting" isn't a technical term, but the specific system that people talking about RCV are actually talking about is usually the system called IRV (instant runoff voting) in the US and AV (alternative vote) in the rest of the world. This is a better way of counting a single-winner election like a President, Governor, directly-elected Mayor or legislator elected from a single-member district. Most of Europe is Parliamentary with the legislature elected by proportional representation, so they don't have single-winner elections that matter, and therefore don't need to think deeply about how to count single-winner elections.

The only country that uses IRV/AV in an election that matters (as opposed to non-executive figurehead Presidencies) is Australia.

The other system that Wikipedia gives as an example of RCV is STV (single transferrable vote) in multi-member districts. It is used for the lower houses of the Irish and Maltese Parliaments, and the Australian Senate. It is also very widely used to elect the governing committees of mass membership organisations like unions.

Continental Europe almost entirely uses party-list PR to elect its legislatures (some systems, including Germany, have constituency MPs but the top-up is designed so that the constituency results don't usually affect the party composition of the legislature). France uses actual runoffs in single-member constituencies, and Italy uses a hybrid of FPTP and party-list PR.

Ranked Choice Voting describes a kind of ballot design where candidates are preferentially ranked, Instant-Runoff Voting describes one way to decide a winner from such ballots.

Australia's had RCV/IRV for federal elections since 1918, and voting in federal elections has been compulsory since 1925, so it's been around a while. There's definitely better ways to decide winners than IRV from a theoretic, Bayesian regret perspective, but what's often missed about the historical popularity of IRV (and particularly its enduring path-contingency in Australia) is that it's dead simple to administer and tally compared to otherwise better methods such as approval/range. IRV solves (or solved) many of the complexities handling preferential voting in simultaneous counts across multiple voting locations in an auditable, non-destructive way (which remains one of the advantages of FPTP, for that matter). Relatedly, Australia's always voted and counted by hand (no voting/counting machines) and has generally done so quite efficiently.

Ranked Choice Voting describes a kind of ballot design where candidates are preferentially ranked, Instant-Runoff Voting describes one way to decide a winner from such ballots.

True, but the only vaguely effective lobbying/activist group for alternative voting methods in the US is FairVote and they are strongly against any voting method other than IRV and one of the ways they actively try to confuse the issue is by using term "Ranked Choice Voting" to refer to Instant-Runoff Voting, as you can see on their website.

it's dead simple to administer and tally compared to otherwise better methods such as approval/range.

I'm confused: IRV is notable for being one of the only voting methods that fails the summability criterion making it by far the hardest to tally. Does this issue just not appear in practice because there just aren't ever that many candidates so the factorial of the number of candidates stays manageable? Or is it handled some other way?

IRV is simpler to tally and audit in low-tech scenarios because the votes themselves are the physical record of the count, an advantage it shares with FPTP. In FPTP, you sort and bundle votes into e.g rubber bands of 20 and boxes of 1000. You can easily verify a count by checking that a box indeed contains 1000 votes, and they've been sorted appropriately. It's easy to update your count report just by seeing you have X boxes and Y bands.

Approval voting, Score, Borda etc require you to maintain a store of the counts independent of the physical ballots, which introduces more room for human error and complicates recounts/verification. You need to increment up to N counts for a race with N candidates, and even approval voting has 2^N-1 ballot variations that complicates sorting.

If you're thinking of terms of low-tech boxes and counting processes, IRV is an intuitive extension of FPTP because you're just opening up eliminated boxes and resorting them. Practically, it's rare for this process to go particularly deep or be particularly sensitive, and the count of votes rarely exceeds twice the votes cast.

I think we're now able to have do much better than IRV and I think there are potentially clever ways you could do tear-off perforated ballots to make the counts under approval/range more reliable, but a lot of (sometimes conspiratorial) questions about the popularity of IRV miss that it was an intuitive and practical solution at the time. If Australian preschoolers can vote on schoolyard activities with IRV, I'm sure American adults can manage.

Oh, counting votes by sorting ballots never even occurred to me. American elections almost always have several races on the ballot, so that's not really a feasible way to organize the counting. The counting is almost always done by machine anyway, with hand-counting only for recounts.

Does this issue just not appear in practice because there just aren't ever that many candidates so the factorial of the number of candidates stays manageable?

Not sure about Australia, but the UK traditionally transported all of the ballots in one race to a central location and mixed them before counting them in order to obfuscate the precinct-level results. (This is logistically trivial if the largest race is a 65,000 elector Westminster seat). So summability is not relevant. For the London Mayoralty (which used an IRV-like system where voters are only allowed 2 preferences) running the whole count at one site is a logistical headache - when the Tories changed the counting system to FPTP this allowed the counters to count the mayoral vote at borough level and sum.

The largest single IRV/AV race is the Irish presidency. Does anyone know how that is counted?

Okay, fair. I didn’t realize Europe was almost totally party list based, I’m familiar with the push for alternative voting in the UK and thought that was an attempt to align with the continent.

There is no push for single-member AV in the UK. Reform and the Liberal Democrats support moving to a proportional system (we prefer STV to lists, but the rhetoric is about the principle of proportionality, not the details of the system); Labour and the Conservatives want to retain FPTP. There was a referendum on moving to single-member AV in 2011 (which failed) because that was the best offer the Conservatives were willing to make to bring the Liberal Democrats into a coalition.

First of all, why push it now, and second, why the partisan divide?

Ranked choice voting seems to many people like a reasonable solution to increasing political polarization and pressure to e.g. "vote blue/red no matter who." Regarding the partisan divide, Republicans seem to have an easier time banding together behind a single candidate even if they have personal issues with them, whereas Democrats seem more likely to either not vote for or at least suffer significant mental anguish about making political compromises by voting for someone who even slightly diverges from their ideal platform. Changing to a ranked choice system would therefore bring in more undecided or otherwise nonvoting Democrats who can signal their desired policies while still pragmatically supporting someone who has a chance of winning, while Republicans don't need such a roundabout method and just vote pragmatically from the start.

Republicans seem to have an easier time banding together behind a single candidate even if they have personal issues with them, whereas Democrats seem more likely to either not vote for or at least suffer significant mental anguish about making political compromises by voting for someone who even slightly diverges from their ideal platform

Is it true though? There's significant "nevertrumper" movement, for example, but I never heard about "neverbidener" or "neverclintoner" movement. I remember recent competitive Republican primaries, including Trump's first one, but I don't remember much meaningful competition on the Dem side once Obama settled the question against Clinton whose turn it is now. In fact, do we have any estimates of how many Dems really abstained from voting D because of political disagreements, rather than threatening it and then voting D anyway? Mental anguish doesn't count - it's what they do, like 90% of their platform is feeling mental anguish about one thing or another, nothing exceptional there.

From what I've seen, Never Trump is mostly an elite phenomenon and does not really reflect typical Republican voters. See for instance what happened to the 10 Republicans who voted to impeach Trump. The Democratic coalition, by virtue of being more diverse, contains many interest groups who can threaten to abstain if they don't get what they want, as in the case of Muslims angry over Biden's position on the war in Gaza. That's not to say there isn't a core of stalwart Dem voters (mostly older and/or Black), but the fickle progressives and minorities are at least perceived by the party leadership as being important to get on side to run up the numbers (even though they may not flip many states).

They may threaten, but would they ever deliver on their threat? I'd assume they hate Trump much more than they disagree with Biden, so at the end they'd do what they are supposed to do and vote Dem. They may sacrifice some low-level congressmen if needed (it's pretty low cost since Reps have the majority anyway) but the Presidency is too important. I don't deny some voters may move to the other camp, eventually, but not just for day-to-day matters. So, frankly, I don't believe the leadership is scared of those fractions. I'd rather believe they are doing what they wanted to do anyway, pretending they are scared by the fractions, to save face for everybody involved - and if they weren't going to do it anyway, they don't.

tactically in places like Berkeley it seems like it allows Dems to cooperate with/coopt fringe GOTV groups for third party candidates. That brings communists who would otherwise disengage and form genuinely competing groups back into the party machine.

"Vote for Antifa McSlaughterkulaks, but make sure Embezzlea Demqueena is your second choice!" is an easier sell to low turnout leftist voters in those places where wiki says ranked choice has been implemented. Saves having to make the "vote for the greatest evil that still has a chance of winning" arguments we see so much of in presidential elections.

It fits the theme of "managerial democracy means making the voters feel heard without any risk to single party rule by the Serious People."

I think we can expect to see masses of performative fringe and ethnic parties that serve to A) smoothly introduce radical policies to moderate dem voters, B) shift the Overton window of what moderate means, while C) maintaining unity with radical factions and minor ethnic blocs by making electioneering cooperative rather than competitive.

Similar to how the parliamentary system works in Europe really, but in some ways even more effective because the minor parties don't have to be brought into a ruling coalition. They can be given non-policy sinecures reviewing Racial Equity Progress Reports from the DEIB offices of city departments

But wouldn't Rs benefit from "vote for Freedom McSovereigncitizen but put Square A. F. Establishmentor Sr. as your second choice" somewhat too? There are some very colorful right-wing fringes too, maybe not as colorful as antifa, but still they exist.

Vote for Antifa McSlaughterkulaks, but make sure Embezzlea Demqueena is your second choice!

That's one helluva bumper sticker.

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