this post was submitted on 04 Jan 2024
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the voting system alone won't break the two party system.
Approval Voting is a better voting method anyway.
We're going to need to move to some kind of proportional system in order to get more parties, and sequential proportional approval is better suited for that task as well.
I'm only coming at you so strong because it's important that we get this right the first time. Approval is the way to go, both in the short term and the long term.
For those that don't know, approval works like this: vote for any number of candidates, most votes wins. That's it. It's dead simple while being one of the more accurate systems by multiple measures.
Link 1 Simulating Elections with Spatial Voter Models
Link 2 Simplified Spacial Model Example
Link 3 2012 OWS Polling
Link 4 Democratic Primary Polling
Link 5 2024 Republican primary
RCV has problems with spoilers, vote-splitting, and non-monotonicity. RCV is so messy we're not exactly sure how often an RCV election was influenced by a spoiler, but it could be as high as 14%, which would put around 75 people into Congress thanks to a spoiler. We know our happened in the Alaska special election, for example.
Anyway, if you want to help switch your local or state elections to approval (and you absolutely should) volunteer here!
Where did you get the 14% figure?
So unfortunately I didn't bookmark that particular source, but the estimates can range fairly significantly. They're sensitive to your technique and your definition of a spoiler. For example, this article calculates both higher and lower probabilities of a spoiler. I don't think it's good for much more than saying that, all else being equal, RCV has fewer spoilers than FPTP (choose one). Contrast that with approval, where spoilers simply don't exist, and approval clearly takes the cake in that category.
This sounds too good to be true. What are the downsides they aren't mentioning?
Also, how would this system handle write ins? Could your ballot potentially be 1000 pages long?
Great question! I tried to keep it short, but yes of course there are down sides. In fact, mathematically speaking, there literally can't be a perfect voting system. Check out the massive tables in this article for which voting method satisfies which criteria.
The down sides people usually complain about when it comes to approval voting all stem from the same feature, you only get to vote yes or no on any given candidate. If you like both Trump and DeSantis, but it's very important to you that you give more support to Trump, sorry this voting system doesn't have that feature. Similarly, if you don't like Ted Cruz so much that you want literally anyone else to beat him, you can express that opinion by voting for everyone else, but you can't differentiate between all those other candidates.
Every voting system has trade-offs, in this case that troublesome feature (simplicity) is also a bonus. You can't invalidate your approval voting ballot. Any combination of votes is valid. RCV has to either invalidate ballots that don't follow the instructions, or come up with a list of interpretation rules to try and make sense of ballots that don't list the candidates in a neat order. By some estimates the invalid rate for RCV is seven times higher than FPTP. Approval is, again, bullet proof in this regard.
Approval is also extremely easy to understand. RCV seems simple enough, but then it can end up doing very strange things and elect nonsensical winners. The frequency of strange things happening under RCV is debated, but the more competitive the race, the more likely confusing results will follow.
I said I'd keep it short, which is why the first comment didn't have too many details. You can talk election systems for days (notice I didn't talk at all about how these systems translate to proportional methods). In a practical sense, RCV and approval agree on the results the great majority of the time, all the way from winner to loser. In those scenarios, well, why go through all that extra trouble? Keep it simple!
Love the enthusiasm and clarity of your writing. I'm convinced.
I don't really see an issue with the particular election you linked to. It tries to argue that because the Republican was in the lead most of the time that it made sense for him to win. However, in the first vote ~67% of people didn't want him elected. And as each candidate was removed from the ballot more and more of them wanted still wanted someone other than the republican, hence the Progressive winning.
Seems to be a pretty effective system to me. Very surprised IRV got repealed because of that election. Were both Democrats and Republicans just upset their candidate didn't win?
If you only think of the election in the terms that RCV brings forward, then by definition all RCV elections find the correct winner. The Burlington RCV election essentially disagrees with two other ways of determining the winner of an election, and likely it would have disagreed with two other methods. If you look at this website, which compares voting methods using the same election, you'll find that RCV (listed as IRV) is usually in the dissenting opinion as to who should be the winner. If you play around with this spacial simulator you'll find that, not only can you generate nonsensical graphs with RCV (showing win scenarios had just plain shouldn't happen) but they take longer to calculate, too.
score approval voting (multiple points for each candidate allowed)