Animated Voting Methods

What Hacker News said

Strong rec user234683 · 2019-10 · on “Ranked-choice voting is on the ballot in New York City”

I always recommend this pair of videos when discussing STAR voting vs other alternative systems. The first video is an easy-to-follow explanation of how spoiler effects can happen in both plurality voting and IRV [1]. In the second [2], the guy who created Star voting applies Ka-Ping Yee's methods to Star voting and animates it side-by-side with alternative systems to show its performance. [1] [LINK] [2] [this video]

Recommends godelski · 2020-10 · on “Maine Becomes First State to Use Ranked-Choice Voting in a Presidential Election”

Simple answer: The math says so [this video] Longer answer: cardinal systems (the generalized form that approval is part of) is able to capture more information about voter preference. It is easiest to see this with something like range voting. You may be familiar with a question like "Do you agree or disagree with x statement?: strongly disagree, disagree, neutral, agree, strongly agree." That is range. Approval would be "Do you agree or disagree with x statement?: Disagree, agree". Conversely FPTP would present you many statements and you have to pick the one you agree with the most, even though you may agree with many in the list. You can probably see here that you are actually able to capture

Recommends nickik · 2021-06 · on “What is ranked-choice voting and why is New York using it?”

Ranked Choice Voting is not really a good idea. It has very strange unintuitive behavior. Doing Score based voting is just much better and arguably simpler and less work. I specially like the Star-Voting, where they do a runoff at the end to cover some extra cases. They also have a few variants for multi-winner and representational voting. Its also much more familiar for people from real live, like online review. [LINK] P.S: Wow a lot of down-votes. RCV is just the alternative that got the most marketing, but once you start looking into the different systems I really don't understand people can stick with RCV just because its slightly better then the system before. If you are gone invest all

Recommends godelski · 2021-11 · on “Seattle residents launch Approval Voting initiative for representative elections [pdf]”

The first link there does actually compare against ranked choice. It is just called IRV. There's a larger comparison that includes more types of ranked choice (also called "ordinal") here[0]. Though I particularly like this animation[1]. I'll also add that there is a lot of nuance to voting and VSE isn't everything. There's a lot of factors to consider including: how do strategies work? Is it scalable? Can it easily be counted and/or verified statistically? How easy is it for voters? How effective are (strong and weak) spoiler candidates? And many more questions. For the most part cardinal methods (like Approval) fair better on all these accounts. There is a slight tradeoff to VSE. Note STAR

Cites tastyfreeze · 2018-11 · on “America’s Hidden Duopoly”

There is a video demonstrating the simulations posted on the OPs reference. [this video] The video was created by the Equal Vote Coalition. They also have some good information on their site. [LINK]

Cites quadrangle · 2020-05 · on “US Senators Introduce Resolution to Allow Remote Voting During Emergencies”

Variants of STAR voting can do Proportion Representation. There's no need to stick to Ranked Choice just for that. The best research out there indicates STAR as the best, and it works best by that simulation you describe as well. Here's some references: The exact same approach as your first link: [this video] [LINK] [LINK] The only Ranked Choice approach anyone is promoting is Instant Runoff which discards preference votes relatively arbitrarily. Your second choice vote never counts if they happen to get eliminated in an earlier round than your first choice. If you have trouble following how IRV unfairly counts votes and even leads to bad outcomes, this simple demonstration may help make it clear

Cites godelski · 2020-09 · on “Ranked-choice voting will be used in Maine’s presidential election, court rules”

For a more interesting experiment Fargo had an election with Approval Voting[0]. Unfortunately RCV (IRV) doesn't solve many of the problems that it claims to do. One of the claims is that IRV prevents spoilers, which is objectively false[1][2]. We're pretty interested in the Favorite Betrayal Criterion to prevent this[3]. We also see that IRV has a fairly poor voter satisfaction efficiency (VSE)[4][5]. It really feels like people just watched the CGP Grey videos on election science and dug no further. Even Arrow himself said that cardinal voting (Approval, score, STAR) is probably the likely answer. They also tend to be much simpler as they only are single rounds and resistant to people acci

Cites godelski · 2020-10 · on “Maine Becomes First State to Use Ranked-Choice Voting in a Presidential Election”

I'm not sure that's a necessary prior. This also isn't a binary condition (informed vs uninformed) but rather a spectrum. One can be reasonably informed (or worse! Misinformed!) and still not vote optimally, but would trend in the direction. Because of this spectrum it is reasonable to also want to handle strategic voting well. Especially because there's nothing better to discourage strategic voting than to make it not very useful (think why would you perform this adversarial attack if it isn't effective?). While the Condorcet criterion itself is nice it is far from the most important (cardinal systems are going to do a good job here). VSE really is measuring the MSE distance between true vo