RankedVote is a web app that allows you to run online contests and make decisions using ranked-choice voting (RCV). RCV is an electoral system used in Maine, Alaska, New York City and dozens of cities across the United States.<p>RankedVote’s goal is to build support for RCV by giving people an easy way to run contests and make decisions online.
Ranking the voting systems: STAR Voting > Approval Voting > Ranked Choice Voting > Plurality ("pick only one") voting.<p>Ranked Choice Voting is marginally better than plurality voting, but it has problems. The chief defect with Ranked Choice Voting is its non-monotonicity, whereby increasing your support for your genuine favorite can actually hurt their odds of winning. This may be what happened in Alaska [1].<p>STAR Voting is a slight modification to Score Voting, where you simply score each candidate and are not forced to rank them. You are given the discretion to give multiple candidates the same score if you so choose. STAR is highly expressive and simple to count: just sum the scores.<p>Approval Voting is appealing because of its simplicity. Both ballots and how they are counted would require only superficial changes versus plurality, such as changing the prompt from "Vote for only one" to "Vote for as many as you like." Approval has a good balance of utility and simplicity.<p>If we are going to invest time and effort into achieving voting reform, it would be a shame to spend that effort on RCV rather than superior alternatives.<p>[1] <a href="https://electionscience.org/commentary-analysis/rcv-fools-palin-voters-into-electing-a-progressive-democrat/" rel="nofollow">https://electionscience.org/commentary-analysis/rcv-fools-pa...</a>
Hi! I actually made a similar site for my own purposes - <a href="https://poller.io" rel="nofollow">https://poller.io</a> - and I've been using it with friends for a while.<p>One interesting finding. I was expecting that Instant Runoff would be the method we all preferred. I also included plurality winner, Borda Count and the Condorcet winner (if there was one) in the list of results. After using this with friends for decisions, I realized that a lot of choices that did very well in borda count were getting eliminated in the IRV. If you have a lot of options in the poll, there's a good chance that an option that will make the majority happy gets eliminated because it has very few first place votes. Academically, I knew this was a possibility, but in practice it happened a ton. This made us change to borda counts as our method of choice for things (and then we promised to not game the system). But... if there's a Condorcet Winner, we always go with that.<p>I also thought that having a borda count as the method of eliminating the "last place" choice in each IRV round would be kinda nifty. This still lets people game the system though, and is kind of a gross hack.<p>Just letting you know our experience in case it is helpful for future options on polls! Good luck!
Hi HN! I’ve been running RankedVote as a solo founder for over a year and have had great success (and luck) with it being used to educate voters in New York City and Alaska. Bill de Blasio even ate a piece of pepperoni pizza as the result of one contest held on RankedVote.<p>BUT…what I’m looking for at this stage are use cases outside of direct voter education where RankedVote can be applied. By crossing over into everyday uses, RankedVote can better promote ranked-choice voting to people who are unaware of it.<p>Recently, I’ve seen it used for anything from mascot naming contests, to monthly book club selections, to scrum prioritization, to deciding what character should be included in a new version of a video game.<p>Question to the HN Community: Where would you use ranked-choice voting in your life (or at work) to make decisions?
I used to be a hardcore pro-RCV supporter (I liked Yang, and Yang made RCV one of his main issues, outside UBI), but I've become a little more jaded in the last few years.<p>Empirically, it seems like RCV-IRV (RCV from here on) not <i>much</i> better than Plurality. For example, look at all the countries and cities with RCV and without. It's not at all clear to me that those with RCV are much better than those without.<p>Both NZ and Australia are dominated by a large center-left and center-right party coalition. Sounds familiar.<p>NZ has a housing crisis that is even worse than San Francisco. Australia is under the thumb of the mineral extraction industry. All sounds familiar.<p>(Obviously NZ and Australia beat the US on some metrics, e.g. single payer healthcare if that's your thing, but there are plenty of European countries that have equivalent or better systems without RCV)<p>There are hundreds of US cities with RCV. None of them are obviously better than those without. They still have all the same fights about zoning and bike lanes and public parking that other cities have.<p>I'd still prefer RCV over Plurality, but I don't really think it's the panacea some of its supporters thing it is.
"How Ranked-Choice Voting elects extremists"<p><a href="https://psephomancy.medium.com/how-ranked-choice-voting-elects-extremists-fa101b7ffb8e" rel="nofollow">https://psephomancy.medium.com/how-ranked-choice-voting-elec...</a><p>This article recommends instead a STAR voting system which is still simple to implement and understand while not electing extremists in some cases. I would be sad to see NYC and others turn to ranked choice without considering all the alternatives.
A question and a comment:<p>1. Would it be straightforward to add other voting systems? The easiest one to add would be approval voting ("Check off any option you'd support"). This has very similar benefits to ranked voting, and is more appropriate in many situations.<p>2. Your description of "How Ranked-Choice Voting Works" describes the "first round" and then the "next round" and "repeat until a winner is found." While those of us who understand RCV understand that these rounds are automatically built into the system, I think it's never made clear to a newbie that the voters don't have to go back and vote again.
I'm glad there's plenty of people here mentioning the Condorcet Winner. Because that's the one and only voting property that I can't compromise on. If there is a Condorcet Winner, a voting system that doesn't choose it is useless. But it's not like IRV has to be entirely thrown out. As some have suggested, it would be just fine to use a hybrid system like "pick Condorcet Winner if it exists, use [IRV/STAR/etc] otherwise".<p>I'd like more people to talk about Ranked Pairs / Tideman. It satisfies a ridiculous number of voting criteria, even more than Schulze, but with the huge advantage that it's <i>explainable</i> to a layperson.
<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ranked_pairs" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ranked_pairs</a>
Feature suggestion: the system automatically tells you when you have a <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Condorcet_paradox" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Condorcet_paradox</a> situation and offers to decide the outcome based on a coin flip instead.<p>Only half joking there, the amount of negative results about ranked-choice voting in social choice theory is quite amazing. I'm not sure whether I'd place it on the efficiency frontier of the 'complex but has desirable properties' versus 'easy to understand but far from perfect' trade-off.
Would you consider a variation where the Condorcet Winner is awarded the win if the Condorcet Winner exists, and where in the cases there isn't a Condorcet Winner, IRV is applied to the Smith Set?
Any MaxVoting method which is any voting method where all voters can freely rate all candidates and all of that information is used to determine a winner (Approval, STAR, Majority Judgement, Division Free, Vote 321, etc.) pushes candidates toward the majority opinion platform, the single political platform that best represents that group of voters at that time.<p>Min voting methods which is any voting method that forces voters to pick only one candidate (plurality, ranked choice voting) favors either the left or right political power position, traditionally held by Republicans and Democrats.<p>Alaska's special election resulted in a race between a Democrat and a Republican where the winner received about 50% of the vote. How did that change anything?<p>RCV is just plurality with a 50% threshold. San Francisco had that until it switched to RCV so it could stop paying for the live run offs.<p>For ending division, MaxVoting methods--any MaxVoting method--will work. It should be up to the people of that area which one they want instead of being imposed from the outside by experts. CommonSenseforUnitingAmerica.org
Not all ranked choice methods are identical - if you're interested in this topic, check out <a href="https://www.researchsquare.com/article/rs-2026611/latest.pdf" rel="nofollow">https://www.researchsquare.com/article/rs-2026611/latest.pdf</a>
Could something like this be used with polling to show a discrepancy between election outcomes and what voters want?<p>For example, for a presidential election in the US we have the electoral college results and the popular vote (which often differ). It would be nice to also have a ranked-choice result to compare against. Especially when it comes time to consider a revote or when courts become involved with elections (a sign the electoral process has failed in some way).<p>I suspect that election results would differ from ranked-choice polling to such a degree that it would become apparent how elections are manipulated by parties, the media, incumbents, etc etc etc:<p><a href="https://journalistsresource.org/politics-and-government/the-influence-of-elites-interest-groups-and-average-voters-on-american-politics/" rel="nofollow">https://journalistsresource.org/politics-and-government/the-...</a><p>Economic elites drive nearly all policy change in the US through campaign contributions and lobbying (highly correlated), while response to the average citizen's preferences is flat across the political spectrum (no correlation).<p>IMHO this mismatch is driven nearly entirely by election results being uncorrelated with voters' preferences. Then the vitriol against outcomes is used by the parties to keep us divided so that much-needed legislation can be simply politicized to stop it. Once support approaches 50/50, it dies in committee.<p>There were 395 bills that died via division this way in the Senate as of 2020:<p><a href="https://americanindependent.com/mitch-mcconnell-block-bills-house-democrats-senate-republicans-gop-fox-news/" rel="nofollow">https://americanindependent.com/mitch-mcconnell-block-bills-...</a><p>I tried to cite the most independent article I could find, but they all mention key politicians. Please don't let names muddy the waters, as the motivation behind divisive politics is the constant here.
Approval voting is much better.<p><a href="https://www.electionscience.org/library/approval-voting-versus-irv/" rel="nofollow">https://www.electionscience.org/library/approval-voting-vers...</a>
This YouTube video "Simulating alternate voting systems" by Primer seems apposite:<p><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yhO6jfHPFQU" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yhO6jfHPFQU</a>
Since many people are talking about STAR voting, also check out this site <a href="https://star.vote/" rel="nofollow">https://star.vote/</a>
I've found it works pretty well.
What is the science behind this? Is it not obvious that most people want to pick a single alternative? And for precision. If you force people into ranking. Is it not obvious that the effort that goes into picking the top alternative is much higher than for let us say the fifth option. Basically, adding noise that may skew the results.
Oh hey, I made one too. <a href="https://betterpolls.com/" rel="nofollow">https://betterpolls.com/</a><p>Focus on Condorcet ("Virtual Round Robin") counting. De-duping by requiring a google or facebook login (or anonymous with a crappy hacky captcha).