Maybe We Were Wrong About Ranked Choice Voting

Ranked choice voting, as it turns out, has lots of problems, as we are seeing as it is being used more and more in the real world. Mr. Beat joins a panel from the Equal Vote Coalition to discuss the issues with RCV and analyze how STAR voting is far superior. Thank you to Sara Wolk, Executive Director at Equal Vote, and to Sass, Operations Coordinator and Board Director at Equal Vote for joining me in this discussion.
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Ranked choice voting: • Ranked Choice Voting E...
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#equalvotecoalition #rankedchoicevoting #starvoting

[@iammrbeat]

Did they change your mind about ranked choice voting?

[@TheDanEdwards]

I always thought it was crazy, so no, my mind didn't change. But as you raised the question of "change your mind", maybe you could take a step back and take a bigger picture look at the nature of the electorate. I sort of get the feeling that all this in-the-weeds stuff about voting algorithms is sort of like rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic.

[@MicaiahBaron]

@@TheDanEdwards If your point is to defend the electoral college, then no, no reason to do anything other than eliminate it. It does literally nothing except keep corrupt people in power.

[@XIIchiron78]

@@TheDanEdwards Politics creates voters as much as voters create politics. The entrenched duopoly is largely what is driving the accelerating polarization we are suffering from the in the first place, not to mention making people more and more apathetic and cynical. There's no incentive to be informed or get involved when doing so would barely matter. Fixing the fundamental problems will radically redefine public discourse.

[@iammrbeat]

@@TheDanEdwards Fair point. However, if most people aren't even familiar with ranked choice voting, I think it's better to focus on the broader messaging revolving around plurality voting and first past the post sucking.

[@iammrbeat]

@@XIIchiron78 I appreciate this pragmatic perspective.

[@boxupos7410]

I always found it odd how I am incentivized to vote for a more centrist candidate in primary elections. Being able to vote for who I honestly prefer would be so refreshing.

[@malachyfernandez6285]

correct me if im wrong, but wouldnt this still be the case with star voting? like I'm still gonna be insentivised to inflate the stars of the canadates I think actually have a chance so they make it to the runoffs...

[@boxupos7410]

​@@malachyfernandez6285 Not really, because even if I rank my favorite highest, I can still rank a popular candidate higher than others. If my favorite doesn't make it to the runoff, the person who _did_ make it and who _did_ get a higher score on my ballot than the other finalist wins my ballot in the runoff.

[@POGEYMANZFTW]

These people should consider reaching out to unions like UAW and Teamsters, or even labor media like More Perfect Union. STAR voting needs all the allies it can get, and unions can help prove its viability by implementing STAR voting for leadership elections.

[@iammrbeat]

Mos def!

[@MeldaRavaniel]

I was chatting with my dad about how frustrated he was at his State Republican primary... Pre election? I don't quite understand, but they do a pre-vote to decide who will be on the primary ballot... Way more extra steps. But anyways, he was complaining about how the extremists (i think he may have called them wackos) were the ones that won (using FPTP) because they were most bombastic and flashy and had a committed support base, but there were several more reasonable candidates that split the vote. I explained approval and Star voting to him and suggested he bring that up as a reform. Since they're small, no machines, it would be really easy for them to switch. I mention this because I actually think Republicans are super ripe for convincing we need to reform election methods. They were so used to just getting their way, but they're also starting to see stuff be weird (granted, much of that is not based in reality... But some is, and RCV is especially scary to them because of the centralization and the opacity of the rounds). *Especially* people who don't like Democrats, but also don't like Trump. They're now in that "who is the least bad" situation.

[@reecev2087]

Star voting incentivizes people to treat it like single winner elections. RCV is better get over it.

[@schroederscurrentevents3844]

You have an unearned confidence in union leadership

[@916Motorsports]

I am in a Union… seiu, and if state wide or international dont like who was voted in, they figure out a way to remove them…

[@jssamp4442]

I missed the live stream and when I saw the 3 hour length I planned to just give it a peek. But the information was so helpful in understanding voting methods that I decided to watch a little more. Then the knowledge and enthusiasm of the guests was so compelling, before I knew it I had watched the whole thing. I'm going to help how I can to get the statewide initiative going in Corvallis.

[@iammrbeat]

Heck yeah, Oregon is leading the country in so many ways, and it's great to hear you part of the this burgeoning movement. Thanks for getting involved.

[@nfpnone8248]

@@iammrbeat The voting method is insignificant to the ballot and what constitutes a majority consensus. So, what happens if you assemble the Most Numerous Legislative Branch by a ranked choice electoral process of only self declared candidates who have won a parties nomination, or are independent? When those persons are assembled in the legislature, they will be assembled by how many seats the party won, and if you don’t elect enough representatives to deny the major parties a majority, they will claim that majority gives their party a mandate to control the legislative assembly, which leaves all other parties as a minority party, and independents must choose to caucus with the majority party, or the minority coalition, which changes nothing in the way decisions, and laws, are made in the legislative body, if the independent parties win enough seats to deny either major party a majority, then it goes to who can form a majority by a coalition of major and minor parties, which still will be controlled by the major party, but the major party promises to support the issues of the minor parts of the coalition for their support, again it changes nothing in how the legislative assembly is controlled or how it functions. In democratic and republican forms of government there is none of this control structure on the legislative process or how they reach a majority consensus. And remember, partisan means unreasoned allegiance to a ideology or faction, which includes political parties no matter what size they are, which is why we have party line votes and whips to coerce the members of their caucus to support the party line. Furthermore it only gets worse as parity is reached between the two major parties making the legislative body more polarized, neither party can get the support of the other party, so the parties spend all their time and efforts in winning the majority, which is a recipe for mutable government, which the Constitution of the United States was written to eliminate.

[@whyamistillhere9718]

​k88j

[@fanfywriter8727]

One of the questions about the founding fathers designing the system on purpose; John Adams literally says the system is garbage and doesn't achieve what they want from a Republic. But they would keep it because people were familiar until after the revolution was over with the hope that congress would take it up later. "The principal difficulty lies, and the greatest care should be employed in constituting this Representative Assembly. It should be in miniature, an exact portrait of the people at large. It should think, feel, reason, and act like them. That it may be the interest of this Assembly to do strict justice at all times, it should be an equal representation, or in other words equal interest among the people should have equal interest in it. Great care should be taken to effect this, and to prevent unfair, partial, and corrupt elections. Such regulations, however, may be better made in times of greater tranquility than the present, and they will spring up of themselves naturally, when all the powers of government come to be in the hands of the people's friends. At present it will be safest to proceed in all established modes to which the people have been familiarised by habit."

[@Ekvitarius]

This is great. What’s the source for this quote?

[@Mutex50]

The lady saying Star Voting is a solution in search of a problem is frustrating.

[@iammrbeat]

Incredibly frustrating

[@anniekallen4472]

I know, right?

[@captsorghum]

What's frustrating is the lady making the claim at 20:15 that Center for Election Science views approval voting as merely a "pragmatic solution." As though they really ought to share her views, and if they don't they must be lying.

[@anniekallen4472]

@@captsorghum I don't interpret her comment as saying that CES is "lying." It's just true that STAR Voting has some advantages in terms of expressiveness and accuracy, while Approval Voting has some advantages in terms of simplicity (while still being almost as good as STAR Voting in other areas). Most STAR Voting supporters are also Approval supporters and vice versa. CES chooses to focus on Approval and Equal Vote chooses to focus on STAR Voting, but we support each others' efforts.

[@captsorghum]

@@anniekallen4472 Her statement was that CES settled on approval voting "for pragmatic reasons." That's different from any claim about the relative merits of the two systems. I haven't seen any poll showing most approval supporters to also be STAR supporters. No doubt some are, but it doesn't follow that approval is the pragmatic choice for those members. It's at least as likely the reverse-- where some prefer "clean" approval voting, but pragmatically accept bastardized methods such as STAR or approval-runoff combinations. STAR ballots can be said to be more expressive by virtue of having more bubbles, but we need to be careful of terms like "accuracy." Accurate in comparison to what standard? The method seems to be a pragmatic combination of score and instant runoff, rather than some ideal system. As such it's prone to insincere voting strategies, possibly better than IRV but by no means perfect. I have no interest in trying to sabotage any STAR campaign, and may even support one for pragmatic reasons. But that doesn't mean I can overlook someone making false claims about the organization I choose to support.

[@pwalshofficial]

This completely changed my opinion of Ranked Choice in favor of STAR/Score

[@josiahnewman4434]

Wow. I never understood this hole in the RCV system. It totally makes sense. The 2nd and 3rd choice votes can be eliminated BEFORE that vote preference is considered for the eliminated candidate. That means candidates are eliminated on partial information and votes really were thrown away. I thought RCV was a gold standard and this video made me question everything. Will absolutely be looking into this more.

[@robertbristow-johnson6362]

But Josiah, this is because of the flawed method of tabulation of ranked ballots. The ranked ballots have the needed and correct information. But the tallying method needs to be different. The solution is fixing the RCV tabulation, not chucking the ranked ballot.

[@ccederlo]

@@robertbristow-johnson6362 Agreed, mostly. Is there such a method that you describe?

[@HotCoals]

Ranked Choice Voting is actually a great system when used with multi-member districts - this system is usually refered to as the Single Transferable Vote (STV), and is usually lumped in with the long list of Proportional Representation electoral systems. RCV with single-member districts is, yeah, not great.

[@XIIchiron78]

STV actually has the same flaws; they are just hidden because each candidate has multiple chances to win. It tends to lead to balkanization and gridlock, where parties compete to win a majority only inside their own niche. There is a better way to do proportionality: by applying the same quotas from STV to scored ballots, you can elect each winner by consensus of the remaining unrepresented voters. This leads to selecting the best group of winners at representing the whole population, rather than just copying the same demographics as the population into the legislature, where minority viewpoints can just be ignored and overruled. This system was adopted by the Equal Vote Coalition as "STAR-PR", because it shares many of the same qualities as STAR does, like its high resistance to strategy. It's also known as Allocated or Apportioned Score.

[@iammrbeat]

Yep, we discussed this in the stream. STV is better, but still has issues.

[@qwite9309]

@@iammrbeatwould you say it works good in local elections with several at large seats. Arlington did this recently with 2 candidates 😊

[@MeldaRavaniel]

The thing I find weird about STV is that the order the ballots are counted in can change the outcome, and I find that unacceptable. A voting method should have one, and only one, outcome. The reason this works is that you start by determining the number of votes a candidate needs to win (commonly it's total ballots divided by n+1, where n is the number of positions). Then you start counting the rank 1 votes. If a candidate reaches that threshold before the first round is over, all remaining ballots that ranked that candidate 1 now count to their 2nd choice. It's possibly a rare situation, because I think you would have to have a group over voters who really liked the first candidate, A, but who were then split supporting two subsequent candidates, B and C. Depending on how the overall electorate feels about B and C, the order in which the ballots are counted could mean sometimes B is elected and not C, and other times the opposite.

[@HotCoals]

@@MeldaRavaniel While the description you provide is otherwise fairly accurate, the claim that votes are tabulated in a particular order is not. STV redistributes surplus votes - votes for candidates who pass the quota. This is to prevent voters wasting their vote voting for a candidate who is *too* popular (the opposite problem than what's normally discussed in electoral reform). But determining *which* of the winning candidate's votes count as "surplus", and thus which votes get to be transferred, is a good question. One counting method, known as "Hare" (not to be confused for the Hare quota calculation method) does literally just decide which ballots count to transfer based on the order they're counted in. Hare-Clark does a random distribution of the ballots. However, though these counting systems technically exist, they are not often used because of the very same concerns you bring up. Which is why countries and cities that have actually implimented STV use ratio'd counting methods, where every ballot with a preference after the winner is tallied up and, essentially, fractioned off to support other candidates. The most brazen of these is the Wright system, but unless your election is fully computerized it's just not practical to use. What's more commonly used instead is the Gregory (or Senatorial) counting method, used in counties like Ireland. The Gregory counting method ensures that every ballot of a candidate who has a surplus gets to have their next preference counted for - evenly and equally! No ballot is left behind unless they list no new preference. Tl;dr, your concern is common and makes sense, but don't worry because there's a solution. Wikipedia is not a source, but it does explain it fairly well if you'd like to ready up further: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Counting_single_transferable_votes#Surplus_vote_transfers

[@XIIchiron78]

Oh, god, finally this message is getting out there

[@iammrbeat]

I know, I know...it took me long enough :)

[@XIIchiron78]

@@iammrbeat welcome the rabbithole that is social choice theory 🥲 Turns out democracy is really, really hard

[@iammrbeat]

@@XIIchiron78 Good thing local governments and state governments can test different methods out

[@natemaas1982]

I feel the same way about voting and it's importance to democracy. I've been a big proponent of rcv so I'm very excited to learn what this video and you as well as your guests have to say..

[@iammrbeat]

Thanks for being here and thanks for being curious!

[@natemaas1982]

@@iammrbeat I hate being wrong, which I was about RCV, but I want to believe as many true things and few false things as possible. And you helped me with that on this issue. Thank you!!

[@JM-us3fr]

@@natemaas1982 I'm in the same boat. I knew issues existed with RCV, but I didn't realize these issues appeared so prevalently in actual elections. I'm glad they've really nailed down the science and are now promoting the best system.

[@natemaas1982]

@@iammrbeatis there any chance you could do a new but shorter video comparing just RCV and STAR? Because I’ve been such a strong proponent of RCV and now after watching this and seeing the issues with it, I’d love to be able to share a video explaining just these two and why RCV comes up short and how STAR voting is a better option.

[@hughoriordain372]

Having finally finished watching this livestream, it has opened my mind a bit more (but maybe not fully convinced me yet) about the criticisms of RCV/IRV. I do have two main issues with the video: 1. It would have been nice to have someone on the panel with a slightly different perspective. Surely someone from a different organisation could have added more to this conversation. 2. I still think the discussion on proportional representation was a bit too limited. The way I see it, when you are limited to single member districts, no matter how well the result reflects the opinion of constituents, there can only ever be one voice from that district represented. Despite this, the discussion was really interesting and has made me more interested in Star voting as an alternative voting system. I would be particularly interested to see how Star voting could be implemented outside of the US

[@eyescreamcake]

Forward Party Spaces has a debate like this, too, with an IRV advocate

[@carywinn3391]

Cynically, I don't see changes being made until the Party in power believes the change would be to that Party's long-term advantage. I wish the changes were for the voter's benefit alone.

[@MunTheOddity]

To some degree, I've felt that RCV (specifically Instant-Runoff Voting, though not Single Transferable Voting) was not exactly an ideal electoral system to strive for, and I thought there was plenty of indicators to this by looking abroad at other's use of it. I mainly got this viewpoint from what I saw of Australia's electoral system and the election results that it typically yielded, though granted, this is mostly surface level research and based on what I've seen to some degree. Australia's primary electoral system of IRV (for its lower house, the House of Representatives) has firmly entrenched a two-party system in Australian politics for the longest time. Hell, IRV was introduced to Australia in 1918 specifically by the then-ruling Nationalist Party to screw over the Labor Party. (Specifically, a by-election in 1918 saw the Labor Party win in a typically safe Nationalist seat by an upset. This was due to the voters splitting the conservative vote among several competing conservative parties, a particular part of First-Past-The-Post that happened to go south for the ruling party). Since then, IRV demonstrably backed a consistent two-party system in the Australian House of Representatives, though with some interesting caveats. Particularly as of the latest federal election, for instance, a lot of independent candidates were elected in formerly safe seats dominated by the ruling Coalition (who were also soundly defeated by the Labor Party in this case). This has resulted in far more scrutiny of the government and did contribute to representing the population's disdain for the prior Nationalist government under ScoMo. Some figures, particularly the Juice Media (who generally is extremely critical of the Australian government generally) seem to surprisingly really favor their electoral system of instant run-off voting despite how critical they are of their country's politics generally. They did often do what they can to show people how they can use their electoral system more intelligently, which may have actually contributed to some of the key races being won by said independents and other party's candidates. But then again, they also are people highly accustomed to this electoral system, and both are privy to its ins and outs while also operating based on its parameters. That, and literally anything is better than the trash-heap that is FPTP (even the abbreviation is awkward, God). Australia's usage of IRV in its elections to me seems like an ample indication as to how such an electoral system influences national politics. At least, it reinforces my own personal stance that one has to look towards other countries and their politics, to a certain extent, and see how their electoral systems impact their political process and their citizen's mentality. Of course, such a stance should also account for our own domestic system and its own impact on the citizenry, as well as how it compares to other political systems.

[@nickverbree]

Thank you so much for taking the time to write a detailed comment. It gives me a lot to think about 👍

[@troy.s]

Recent convert from RCV to STAR as well. However, if such a reform were to go through, I would hope to also see an elimination of party primaries and the listing of parties on the ballots themselves. We need to be voting for people rather than parties!

[@darbyl3872]

There's no need to fight in several battles at once. STAR would work in the current structure.

[@troy.s]

@@darbyl3872 Not really. If a candidate gets knocked out in the primary, they won't be on the ballet in the general. There were 2 democrats and 1 republican I would have supported that never made it to the general election in 2016. Can't really vote for candidates that aren't on the ballot. By eliminating party primaries, it forces the parties to put their best candidates forward and discourages negative campaigning across the board. Every candidate will have to focus on their own strengths rather than their opponent's weaknesses. By eliminating party affiliations on the ballot, it forces the parties to do the same thing.. focus on name recognition by focusing on the positive aspects of their own candidates rather than the negative aspects of their opponents.

[@darbyl3872]

@@troy.s I'm saying that the focus should be in one area first. If Equal Vote Coalition wants to go after primaries for the general election, great, but I think it's better to do that and not bother with the other areas like the general election itself, and local elections, and state elections, all at the same time.

[@captsorghum]

With STAR voting, it seems like two non-centrist factions have an incentive to down-rate a Condorcet candidate, in order to try to force said Condorcet candidate out of the runoff. The two colluding factions then face off in the runoff round. I suppose this only works if the colluding factions each believe they have a decent chance of winning the runoff, and if the factions view the gamble as having higher utility than a likely Condorcet winner. This is not an issue with approval voting, because you have no way to collude with another faction without giving equal support to that faction. You either approve of additional candidates you actually like, or else you bullet vote.

[@qwite9309]

my brain just shuts down whenever people bring up Condorcet candidates, could you explain it to me like I am a normie voter.

[@captsorghum]

@@qwite9309 A Condorcet candidate is simply a candidate who would beat each of the others in separate head-to-head races.

[@eyescreamcake]

This seems highly unfeasible

[@bongi6811]

Yes, this can happen with STAR voting, but it could be argued that the voters for either non-centrist candidate accepted the risk of getting letting the other non-centrist candidate win by giving the Condorcet candidate a comparatively low rating. Those voters basically willingly went for all or nothing and now have to accept the outcome and the Condorcet candidate has to accept that they didn't have enough supporters who wanted them to win over risking it for another candidate. A alternative to STAR voting that guarantees that a based on the match ups Condorcet candidate wins the election would be Ranked Robin, but that comes at the cost of other tactics issues like supporters of one non-centrist candidate deliberately ranking another non-centrist candidate over the Condorcet candidate they actually prefer to balance out the number of won match ups between the two disliked candidates to make their candidate win.

[@shadowyzephyr]

Approval has the problem of people having different standards of "approval": if there is a candidate I really like and a candidate I mostly like, I might normally approve of them both, but if they are close in the polls, I will strategically only vote for the candidate I really like. At worst, this becomes almost as bad as an FPTP election (though less trend towards 2 party), with everyone only voting for their favorite candidate. This strategy is fairly simple to implement and works. Approval voting > IRV > FPTP, but STAR is still better than all of them. In simulations it has been shown that strategizing with STAR is actually very difficult due to the double round system, it's very likely your strategy will accidentally backfire. You'd have to think about both who gets into the runoff and who would win it, it's just much harder to strategize effectively in STAR. That being said there are other options such as Ranked Pairs that also perform well, STAR is not the only good option.

[@lesalbro8880]

STAR voting is the best of these options. However I'd say the ideal number of scoring options is 7 not 5. If you remember when you did the various political ideology tests, the ones with 7 options were by far the most accurate and nuanced. Your guests were correct that at a certain point extra scoring options become pretty pointless, but I'd say 5 is minimal. Ten is probably the maximum which would be reasonable. People are used to ranking things 1 to 10. They'd probably be pretty comfortable with that, but it still would be a little unwieldy. I think 7 is the sweet spot.

[@captsorghum]

The ratings shown were 0-5, so there are actually six options. Not far from your seven. But tactical voters would likely use fewer anyway. The two tactical objectives are (1) to control entry to the runoff stage, and (2) to be able to select between likely runoff candidates. Others voters may prefer to express themselves fully by using all the levels and scoring sincerely, but they would be giving up some voting power by doing so.

[@malachyfernandez6285]

Im not convinced. it still feels like im incentivised to inflate the ratings of canadates I think "actually have a chance" so they make it to the runoffs. in that respect were back at square one. also people will find rating REALLY WEIRD. people know how to rank things. people understand ranking things.

[@darbyl3872]

@@malachyfernandez6285 People understand Amazon's 5-star ratings. It's just that simple. It gets difficult for those trying to strategize and not vote honestly. They hurt their own cause by promoting a less desirable candidate.

[@thomasreasoner6253]

@@malachyfernandez6285 , not quite square one. Inflating the ratings would just turn a STAR ballot into an Approval one, and Approval is an excellent system!

[@UnKnown-xs7jt]

If we could do this it would help all Americans ! It’s unlikely that those in power will allow this. As it may take away their power

[@greenlach7398]

You should do the vote compass political test for the US and maybe even different countries to see where you would sit

[@iammrbeat]

I dig this idea

[@kathleennile7611]

I like this. My problem with ranked choice is the quantitive amount. I have times when I have a stronger prefference for one candidate or a nearly equal support for more than one candidate.

[@BigHenFor]

You need to rank your priorities in voting for any candidate. Not every issue is equally important for every person, but who you choose should reflect your priorities.

[@plasmaballin]

I used to support range voting on the basis that, if everyone votes according to their true preference, then it will always pick the candidate who really is the most preferred out of all candidates. I knew there was a potential for strategic voting, but I didn't think it would change this that much. But it turns out that there's actually a mathematical proof that the best way to strategically vote in range voting is always to give the highest score to the candidates who you approve of above a certain threshold and the lowest score to those who are below that threshold (with the threshold itself being your average approval of all candidates, weighted by the probability you think they have of winning, i.e., your expected value for how much you will approve of the winner). So in practice, it will devolve into "approval voting except the people who vote honestly have their votes count for less." I still think range voting is the best system in cases where everyone can be expected to vote honestly - for example, if you want to find out what movie people like the best, have them rate each movie and see which has the highest total - but for a high-stakes political election, it's not as good. Currently, I'm not sure what the absolute best system is. I like approval, star, 3-2-1 voting, Condorcet, and highest-median (though I'm not sure which Condorcet method and which highest-median method are the best), all of which seem to have theoretical advantages. But I would be happy to have any of them over the current awful system, or over IRV, which is only a marginal improvement.

[@plasmaballin]

Actually, I think a slight improvement over 3-2-1 would be to include additional ratings of "Excellent" and "Horrible" so that voters could express their preference in a more fine-grained way for the final round (they would still count as "Good" and "Bad" for rounds 1 and 2). I like 3-2-1 voting because, unlike other voting systems try to base the winner just on how many people think the candidate is good (e.g. plurality and instant runoff), it specifically includes a step where a candidate who is considered bad by too many people is eliminated, which makes it more likely for a less polarizing candidate to win.

[@Yankees91919191]

“No, Ralph Nader Did Not Spoil the 2000 Election” - Mr. Beat

[@iammrbeat]

I still agree with that statement. The spoiler effect is extremely flawed. However, I didn't want to offend my guests.

[@Yankees91919191]

@@iammrbeat haha, I figured! Interesting conversation

[@captsorghum]

@@iammrbeat I agree. Nader was more of a protest vote than a spoiler. Democrats may feel they were entitled to Nader's votes, but in reality the Nader voters would likely have voted for some other 3rd party candidate or no one at all. I think the ability of a dark horse candidate to draw votes away from a flawed candidate, which otherwise would have been given out of blind party loyalty, is actually a good thing. It's like predators culling the sick and weak, thereby strengthening the herd. That's my buffalo theory of voting.

[@sara_wolk]

The point is that it wasn't Nader's fault, and it wasn't his voter's fault or the Green Party's fault. It's the voting method's fault. It's also not a given that Nader voters would have voted for Gore if Nader hadn't been in the race. Some certainly wouldn't have voted at all.

[@Yankees91919191]

@@sara_wolk fair enough. Thanks for clarifying

[@ccederlo]

Big props for being willing to have your video critiqued and I really found this discussion transformative. However, had I not decided to watch this follow up video critiquing your original video, then I would have carried on blissfully unaware of the pitfalls of RCV. Gotta have more streaming with folks fact checking your work more often! I would love to see the information in this video broken down into a bite sized series on RCV pitfalls. There's a lot of info to parse.

[@GymmyJosh]

I was taught in undergrad polo sci that ranked choice voting favours centrist parties because they tend to be most people’s second choice. That seems to be why Canada’s at the time ruling Liberal party declined to change our voting system when a parliamentary committee recommended a mixed member proportional system instead of ranked choice. I’m amazed though that you didn’t review MMP as it results in representation that is much more accurate to voting than ranked choice. That’s why it is used in many European and other countries, whereas ranked choice, last I heard, was only used in two countries globally, France and Australia. The only problem with MMP is that it is difficult for voters to understand but still Fairvote Canada recommends it.

[@catmonarchist8920]

Problem is that the US would have a neat impossible time implementing cross-state districts and multi member districts are illegal for the federal legislature.

[@GymmyJosh]

@@catmonarchist8920 I don't see why the districts would need to be implemented cross-state and given the way the American constitution seems to work with states wouldn't it need to be implemented on a state level and state by state basis anyhow?

[@catmonarchist8920]

@@GymmyJosh The number of representatives are assigned to states and their election can be regulated federally. It's why there's no multi member districts anymore. MMP would need districts across states because of the list regions. Few states have enough representatives to have a list for themselves. If you want a list threshold of 5%(maximum to truly be considered proportional) , you need at least 20 seats overall (1/20 = 5%) and only California, Texas, Florida, and New York have more than 20.

[@shadowyzephyr]

RCV does not favour centrist parties. It only does relative to FPTP, where someone in the center of 2 major candidates has no chance). There is center-squeeze effect in RCV as well + RCV is non-monotonic which causes weird behavior sometimes.

[@SuperGion915]

My only concern with STAR is that it would usually favor candidates that are in the status quo rather than very changing alternatives, in most cases it seems fine but it would be a hell to live under the same status quo because the 2 sides would rank the moderate higher and put him in office, other than that it seems fine and anti-establishment thinking could absolutely take place.

[@eyescreamcake]

It favors candidates who best represent the will of the electorate. When the electorate changes their minds, the STAR winner changes with them.

[@aedwa021]

If the directions for how to make sure your vote is counted are not sufficiently clear, that almost feels like a poll test, and would probably deter new voters, especially if they don't have someone close to them to sufficiently explain it.

[@MichaelRussell3000]

I like that: "The reason the wealthy can choose our candidates is the Electability Problem which is a mechanical problem we can fix." - Sass

[@ckq]

1:08:00 I think ranked choice voting is still pretty great because the criticisms apply to all voting systems since it's impossible to determine a perfect winner (Condorcet paradox). What's good about it is there's no gaming the system and results are straightforward. The wacky results only happen when the race is wide open, if it's a 2 person race with some minor spoilers, RCV is clearly the best choice.

[@jacobite2353]

RCV is often used by the big parties to pretend to reform the system to appease reformists but accomplish very little in reality.

[@XIIchiron78]

Cardinal methods do not suffer from the Condorcet paradox. This is because they have _more information_ to work with than simple ranked ballots provide. They choose _consensus_ winners instead of strictly _majority_ winners (which do not always exist). For STAR in particular, it chooses the Condorcet winner almost always, unless they are polarizing (widely disliked by some part of the population such that they don't make it into the top two scorers). This is a feature, not a bug. The Condorcet criterion is incompatible with many other desireable qualities. Also to your second paragraph, I'm not sure where you got that there's no gaming the system, but the strategy for RCV/IRV is the same as FPTP: favorite betrayal. You vote for a lesser evil rather than risk having your vote not count. Because IRV only looks at who your first choice is at any given time, this is a required strategy whenever there is any ambiguity in the elimination order. You are correct that in an uncontested election where third parties are irrelevant, RCV will pick the majority winner. But so does FPTP and basically every other method. The problem is that we want to be in exactly the chaotic zone where elections _are competitive,_ because those are the ones that matter. The part you are missing is that the candidates and parties in the race change. RCV, because it breaks whenever third parties get a decent share of support, prevents those parties from gaining ground just like the current system does. Because voters will avoid the risk. This is the thing that keeps everything awful. This isn't hypothetical - Australia has used it for over a century, and remains essentially a duopoly, despite having a proportional parliamentary system in the Senate. In other words: RCV might have saved Bush v Gore. But under a real electoral system, that never would have been a real option, because neither would likely have been popular enough to be a frontrunner.

[@balabanasireti]

​@@XIIchiron78Nah

[@iammrbeat]

@@XIIchiron78 is correct

[@Tzizenorec]

Could you give an example of the 2-person race you mean? Generally speaking if there are only 2 viable candidates, then Plurality voting works perfectly, and so does every other voting system (barring sortition).

[@michaelburt9839]

Would school board votes, where it's posed, more or less, as, "Choose three out of these 8 candidates," be approval voting?

[@cunningham-code]

That’s proportional voting. You can get that with proportional RCV or STAR-PR.

[@tonysax7464]

Like @eyescreamcake said, many school board use block voting, which is a multiwinner election method, but not a proportional method. It's actually super unfair because it allows majority groups to vote as a "block" and get every candidate they want elected.

[@captsorghum]

I've seen it called _limited voting._ Depending on how it's implemented, it could also be a form of _cumulative voting,_ if everyone gets three votes and can give all three votes to a single candidate if desired.

[@ChrisEly]

No, that's a multiple winner plurality election. In approval voting, every candidate has a set of either approved or not approved, with no response being the same as not approved. This is often summarized as 0/1 for mathematics / software because it makes the counting as simple as addition. Approval voting can be used for selecting multiple winners, usually by choosing the top N scores after adding all of the approval support from the ballots. STAR can also be used for multiple winner elections because they are both scoring-based systems, they share a lot of the same underlying behaviors.

[@cliffordew]

I believe there is one more thing that really needs to be added to all candidate voting, "none of the above". If "none of the above" wins you have to try again. but no one in the first vote is allowed to be on the new ballot. "We, the people" need to have a way to reject ALL of the candidates from the political machines (aka parties).

[@malachyfernandez6285]

people are never gonna be happy w the canadates, so it'll never pass lmao

[@BaddeJimme]

I think it should be a sortition option. In other words, a randomly selected citizen gets the job. Obviously this doesn't select the best candidate, but it is the best way for voters to flip the board and have someone who isn't in the pockets of the establishment. With a second election the establishment would simply bankroll more corrupt candidates and not much would change.

[@shadowyzephyr]

This will never happen. In fact, other countries have ways for people to throw away their vote in protest or vote blank, and it rarely makes a difference among national elections. Also, imagine the chaos that would cause, if a position is delayed because they had to "try again." and they had to find new candidates.

[@TheBilgepumper]

Is there a shorter video or article that is just the point, without the history lesson or anything that isn't directly about the point in the title? Something that assumes the viewers/readers know about a few voting systems (including ranked choice) already.

[@williampennjr.4448]

The President isn't supposed to represent the majority. He is supposed to represent ALL the people. Senators aren't supposed to represent the country. They are supposed to represent their state. Only representatives are supposes to represent the people of their district.

[@glenchilada]

I really want them to do the talk show circuit. Lol💜

[@ddddirge]

Tbf any type of voting in a single member districts are bad, but at least Ranked Choice is much better than pure plurality because at least Ranked Choice has treshold Legislative election might be better if they change into open party list (with some locality flavour) or maybe mixed member if they wanted to be "more local" 🤔🤔🤔

[@eyescreamcake]

Ranked Choice just perpetuates a polarized two-party system, so each single-member district is "represented" by someone supported by roughly half of the population (= not very representative of the district). STAR is a consensus voting method that elects the person who best represents the entire district. So while PR would be nice to have, in many elections it's impossible, and a consensus method should be used to elect the single member.

[@qwite9309]

⁠@@llllukaagreed Congress when having good redistricting and star voting could work with single member, there is more to the interaction and personalization to your constituents. A random person from your party delegate representing the popular will/ vote share is not very personal to your constituents and would be very unorthodox for Americans. Multi member should work for local counties

[@casp512]

I live in a country with a mixed member system, so maybe I can shed some light on the subject. The way it works here (at least in federal elections) is that you have two votes: One you can cast for a single candidate unique in your voting district and the other for a political party. The first vote is in a FPTP system: The candidate with the most votes is chosen to represent the district in parliament. The second is in a proportional system: The percentage of the second votes a party got determines the percentage of seats in parliament. If a party fails to reach a threshold of at least 5% of the second votes or fails to win at least three voting districts, they won't gain any seats through the second vote. The seats are first filled with winners of the district elections and then filled with the people who are on the state lists. There are also a few exceptions and extra things but those aren't really important for understanding the broad system. It may sound pretty complicated but I think it's a really good system since it manages to represent the whole country but also accounts for the interests of low-population areas. I think in this case RCV would make sense for the second votes since it would only be the votes for parties who failed to meet the thresholds who would have their votes cast for a different party. And in the case of the first vote STAR voting would make sense since the amount of candidates is usually not that big.

[@captsorghum]

20:15 I object to the speaker's claim that the Center for Election Science views approval voting as only a "pragmatic solution." That's just speculating on other groups' motives, with no basis in fact. I'm a CES and approval voting supporter, and I certainly don't view it as a "pragmatic solution." That said, after watching the full three hour presentation, I found it generally quite good. It's probably impossible for someone to talk for three hours without a couple of gaffes. I do have a minor concern about both Sarah's and Sass's statements that STAR tabulation is simple addition. Isn't this true only for the score phase? For the runoff phase, don't you have to have what amounts to a single instant runoff round to determine which of the two finalists is the winner? I assume that's done in software. Granted you probably would have read the totals into a matrix by this point, so I suppose there's no need to go back thru the original ballots, but it is an additional step. On the question of accuracy, both STAR and Score voting incentivize insincere ratings: (1) Score voting incentivizes giving each candidate either the minimum or maximum possible (e.g. 0 or 6) on the ballot, making it similar to approval voting. (2) STAR voting incentivizes voters to give the preferred of two front-runners a 5 in order to make sure a viable candidate is in the runoff, and to give the other front-runner a 0 in order to hopefully prevent entry into the runoff phase. In either case, how are these falsified scores any more accurate than a simple but sincere 1 or 0? Expressive yes, but accurate? Isn't there an implied inequality between voters who know how to vote strategically, and those who can't use strategy or who insist on marking sincere preferences, thereby reducing their own voting power?

[@DarkenRaul1]

What I think is cool is how we have not 1, but 2 equally good systems based on preference of style (if you like ranking: Ranked Robin and if you like scoring: STAR). The next question then comes with electing representatives (as opposed to single seat winners like governors or presidents): should stick with single-winner elections of smaller districts or have multiple winner proportional representation or bloc representation of larger districts? I’m personally a big fan of proportional representation and was previously sold on STV, but I saw the Equal Vote Coalition’s results on Proportional STAR and was pretty excited by the results. My question then is could Ranked Robin also be scaled to a proportional system as well (and be the upgrade to STV as single winner Ranked Robin is the upgrade to RCV)? Also are there any arguments in favor of multi winner bloc representation (and usage of STAR/Ranked Robin for that) or should that just be abandoned altogether in favor of proportional representation?

[@shadowyzephyr]

Well, Copeland/Ranked Robin often have ties. So they aren't really complete on their own. There is also Ranked Star/RP/Schulze though, lots of good systems, if people are willing to look past their nose.

[@danwylie-sears1134]

About an hour in, I am definitely not impressed with score voting, with or without automatic runoff. Sure, it's an improvement over winner-take-all plurality voting, but that's a bar that no alternative voting system has yet managed to limbo under. I want NOTA (none of the above) to be an option for all offices that can reasonably be left vacant. If I'm going to have a more complicated ballot than "vote for up to three", I want it to be something better than just approval voting with extra steps. Score voting is worse than approval voting, because it's approval for voters who understand the implications, while letting others waste part of their vote by choosing something other than 0 or 5. It makes voters less equal, in a way that's not obviously justified. I don't think 50% plus half a vote (where the half only comes into play if the number of voters is odd) is a meaningful threshold. In the classic scenario where a third of voters prefer A over B over C, another third prefer B over C over A, and the remaining third prefer C over A over B, any candidate can get a majority by leaving the candidate upstream of them. I understand the phrase "ranked choice voting" to mean any system where voters rank the candidates. The problem that first-choice votes are the sole basis for elimination is a problem with the method of deciding a winner, not with ranking per se. A ranked choice ballot gets all the information a voter can meaningfully provide without introducing options other than the candidates themselves. You could get real information about strength of preference if you could get voters to choose between (option A) having their first- and second-choice candidates do a coin toss to see who wins, and (option B) having their top three candidates roll a die, with first-choice winning on 1 to 4, second-choice on 5, and third-choice on 6. If they barely prefer first over second, but hate third, they'll take option A; if they love their first-choice candidate and barely prefer second over third, they'll take option B. Adding randomness or something else like NOTA would be very hard to get people to agree to, so ranked choice is in principle the best we can do -- just without the ill-advised elimination criterion. The stuff on election security at 1:14 sounds like a bad case of motivated reasoning. With approval (and no disapproval mark), any failure of chain-of-custody is an opportunity to add additional approvals. With ranked choice, you tally all the orderings, and send those tallies to a central location. A failure of chain-of-custody is an opportunity to spoil ballots, same as in any system, but in ranked choice the only alteration of a ballot that produces a non-spoiled ballot is to add lower-ranked choices to ballots where the voter didn't specify any.

[@tamoramuir2089]

Yeah, your local representative won using the current system, so she can't see a reason for reform. My guess is that even in the "non-partisan" Primary in Oregon, the 2 major political parties have a great deal of power and she probably feels a great deal of loyalty to her Party for getting her elected and for passing her priorities/blocking the other party's priorities in the State House or Congress. After all, political wheeling and dealing with control of majority and near-majority voting blocs is how laws get passed in both State and Federal Houses/Congress. She likely has blinders on when it comes to hyper-partisanship (or maybe she thinks it's all the other party's fault) and she won't even notice a 3rd party "spoiler" candidate unless she faces that unusual situation in her own next campaign. After all, voters have been trained very well to vote only for a major party candidate. Those who don't, know they are throwing their vote away in a protest vote and have to hate both of the major party candidates with an equal passion to do so.

[@H.G.Wells-ishWells-ish]

Addendum to my previous comment: Will candidates under STAR be forced to sign onto a third party ticket, or simply run as a second candidate in an established party? The former would be better, IMO, and implement a legitamate multi-partisan system.

[@sara_wolk]

STAR Voting can be implemented in either partisan elections or in non-partisan ones: -In places that already have party primaries the way it would work is to have STAR Voting used in each party's primary and then have the winners of each primary compete in the general election. -In places that already have non-partisan elections or open primaries with STAR you could just skip the primary all together and just run one STAR Voting general election. If it's for an election that's generally highly competitive another option is to do a Final Five STAR primary where you have the top 5 candidates advance to the general and then use STAR Voting again for the final election. STAR Voting is adaptable and works great in any context, really. In general we recommend just changing the voting method and keeping the rest of the system the same so voters and the voter education campaign can really focus on the voting method change itself. Other changes can be adopted down the line if the problems still persist. STAR Voting really gets to the heart of so many issues in the political space that I personally expect it'll do more than people expect.

[@williamwingo4740]

The big problem with preferential voting systems is that picking somebody for second, third, etc. can actually hurt your first choice, depending on how the later rounds turn out. People know that, or else they soon figure it out. The result is that in most preferential systems few voters express any choice after their first, so the question becomes pointless.

[@eyescreamcake]

Depends on the system. RCV doesn't have that problem, but does have the opposite problem, where ranking a candidate honestly as your favorite can hurt you.

[@b43xoit]

Choose-one plurality voting is working great, for the ruling class.

[@angelsy1975]

3 hrs... is there a cliffs notes version?

[@Tetrix9898]

Well the title has my attention since I really like the idea of Ranked Choice. We will see how this goes. Thanks for the content.

[@jacklorax]

Thanks for the info. I have been promoting RCV and now see the problems. Also, from what you explain here, I think the advantage of STAR Voting over Score Voting is mostly theoretical, while the latter has the big advantage that the numbers have to be added up only one time and it is easier for everyone to understand. In addition, Score Voting could be easily added up by hand, if necessary.

[@ccederlo]

True Also, Score doesn't abide by the 1 person, 1 vote requirement. Someone voting a candidate a 5 vs a 1 results in their vote being valued as either (5 votes vs 1 vote) or (1 vote vs 1/5 vote). The automatic runoff converts the preferences into a single vote for one of the two final candidates (or equal preference). And STAR reduces the incentives to strategically vote, so voters can vote honestly.

[@andreasruhm1690]

The biggest problem is, that changes/reforms produces loosers. Its obvious, who has no interest in changes. There is also to mentioning, that the short term of the House of Represantive makes money more valuable in the democratic process.

[@Fraublitz]

I want a ballot that shows all the candidates not those chosen in a primary.

[@DanielKolbin]

For the 2024 Presidential Election, if it happened today, that would be 855 candidates long.

[@ChrisEly]

​@@DanielKolbinLet's do it! Remember, you don't need to score or even review them all in STAR. I only need to score candidates I want to support. The rest can share the zero by default position.

[@Fraublitz]

@@DanielKolbin I don't find that a problem, it bugs me that every primary a party person is chosen and bought my money not chosen necessarily for skill.

[@jamesrobinson7050]

There are thousands of elections held every two years that are very, very important that would not have anywhere near 855 candidates. If we require that a presidential candidate must have ballot access in at least 20 states, or pick some other number, say 15, in order to be considered an option for electors in December, then that 855 would be reduced to something much smaller and more manageable. Also, consider that citizens are choosing electors in November.

[@ictoan5966]

Let's say there are three candidates, A, B, and C. Couldn't supporters of Candidate A simply vote "5" for A, and "0" for Candidates B and C? Doing so would massively increase the chances of Candidate A winning, as a higher score would be allocated. It wouldn't be a stretch to assume that candidates in an election would encourage this type of voting as well. If that happens, it's only a matter of time until supporters of Candidate B and C do the same, or else Candidates B and C would have a disadvantage. If this continues, STAR voting would simply devolve into First Past the Post.

[@tonysax7464]

While, yes, everyone only voting for their preferred candidate or "bullet voting" would be the same as Choose One Voting/First Paat the Post, it isn't likely to happen at all. The Automatic Runoff portion of STAR still occurs and voters will want their vote to matter for that. So if they are voting strategically, they'll vote 5-4-0 or 5-1-0. This also ignores the fact that STAR Voting would simply just encourage more candidates to run for office, which would prevent this situation.

[@critiquegeek7987]

Yes, this is a large flaw. It would be a potential problem at any number of candidates, where the candidates with stronger bases of support (but not popular among the larger electorate) might get a lot of 5-0-0-0- votes, giving them an advantage in the "Score" step of STAR if supporters of other candidates give a broader range of scores (like 5-4-2-1). In this stream, they kept talking about how STAR voting allows you to vote honestly, but they failed to address that STAR voting actually *needs* people to vote honestly for it to work correctly. The upside is that this flaw can only be abused through open and widespread coordination.

[@EileenTheCr0w]

I think the biggest issue is that we don't give 3rd parties and underdogs a chance because of strategic voters feeling like they have to vote to hold off the "more evil" candidate by voting the lesser of two evils. I want to fix that issue with not being able to vote our conscious. I'm glad we don't have a flat popular vote for president for sure, because we would've had Hillary in 2016 which would've been a disaster, however I also hate that we can't have more diverse candidates that need to form coalitions like they do in some European parliaments, because then even the minority parties have real impact by forcing the major parties to concede some things. But I think Ranked choice is concerning because of the way it can be gamed in essence to have spoiler candidates that are almost designed to peel support from one faction (say establishment or populist, etc..). Then you might have a candidate where the majority doesn't even like the nominee or winner, but because they were sitting on the fence enough to not offend either side they end up getting a huge share of the 2nd or 3rd choice votes and come out on top.

[@cixzejy]

One thing I don't understand about Alaska is how RCV was worse than normal. In a normal election There would be a Republican primary and a Democratic Primary. Peltola would've won the Democratic one and Palin Would've won the Republican. More people preferred Peltola over Palin thus Peltola would have won. Basically RCV didn't do much. I don't get how Republicans are outraged if they are just going to puch for a system where they would've lost anyway.

[@blakekaveny]

In the august special election. Sarah palin finished number 1 in the primary peltola finished fourth. RCV elections are different then first passed the post elections. You can’t run attack campaigns with FCV or that’s not gonna wanna make people rank you. The fact is peltola got the most votes in the first round since she was the only democrat. But once begich got eliminated palin should’ve gotten most of begichs votes. But 11k begich voters didn’t have a second choice . More republicans voted then democrats and having 2 republicans should’ve been an easy win for them.

[@blakekaveny]

Basically total votes 188,666 peltola got 39% both begich and palin combined had more votes.

[@cixzejy]

@@blakekaveny I still don't get it if the Begich voters didn't put Palin than thy didn't vote Palin. if they left the second spot blank than they chose to do as and probably would've left that blank in the election anyway. Peltola is quite conservative too so it's not a surprise that a decent chunk of Begich voters put her over Palin. So I don't really get your argument. Most people would choose a conservative Dem over a fascist even in Alaska.

[@blakekaveny]

@@cixzejy my point is they were upset about because this should’ve been an easy win for the republicans. Palin should’ve been trying to do everything to get begich voters to rank her second but she didn’t do that. They should’ve won this and they screwed it up

[@christiannipales9937]

CGP Grey is a key stone in KZbin culture

[@eyescreamcake]

ChatGPT Gray?

[@christiannipales9937]

@@eyescreamcake my bad. Really bad misspell

[@ja_u]

Ok, after 3 hours I now agree Star Voting is a good option but after you brought it up on another voting system earlier on, I dont get how Star Voting wont also turn into approval voting where you want Luke and Leia both to have 5 stars so a possible face-off between Luke and Darth Vader isnt lessened bc you gave 4 to Luke and not 5? Am I missing something here?

[@darbyl3872]

It IS Approval Voting if you prefer to use it that way. That's a huge benefit with little downside, since voters can be "strategic" or just vote their own way, but it doesn't make much difference when so many other voters give 4 out of 5, or also 0 out of 5, and others approve of other candidates with 5 out of 5. Basically, you sacrifice accuracy by giving 0s or 5s, but it doesn't hinder those voting with more accuracy.

[@darbyl3872]

STAR Voting Rocks!

[@E.C.GoMusicandMore]

Delagative democracy > Representative democracy

[@fettfrosch1]

Hi Mr Beat

[@b43xoit]

From the live chat: "MomentsInTrading ​​What we need from government is either less corruption, or more opportunity to participate in it." LOL

[@JM-us3fr]

Welp, I'm definitely saving that image at 2:10:00 . Might come in handy when I'm trying to convince people that we need voting reform.

[@vesk4000]

I prefer Ranked Robin more than STAR, I'm not sure why they didn't talk about it more, or why they prefer STAT over it. I wish you would've questioned them more, or maybe invited advocates for other voting methods too.

[@eyescreamcake]

1. Score ballots allow expression of strength of preference. 2. STAR is simpler to explain. Both are good, though.

[@BrownBombero7]

2:08:57 Could someone please give some examples to back that claim because I can't think of any

[@familyshare3724]

STAR is certainly good. It's two phases, including a final two runoff is clever. However, except for an incentive to distinguish frontrunners, I am confident that a ruthless strategy is effectively Score, which is effectively Approval, with about 50% to 300% weight advantage. Thus the simplicity and no strategic advantages of Approval makes Approval the singularly superior voting system

[@HarvestStore]

Great video.

[@breakingboardrooms1778]

Consensus democracy is best.

[@yuuneeq9494]

So when we vote on what our voting system should be, what voting system will we use to do it?

[@ThunderTheBlackShadowKitty]

RCV has growing pains in America simply because a lot of people don't yet understand how it works. Most of the problems you mentioned are from growing pains and human error. I for one genuinely like STAR voting and would vote for it in a heartbeat, however I'd argue RCV is a net good everywhere it has been implemented so far. I think Peltola would've won regardless if she went up against Begich or Palin in the runoff. The majority of Alaska residents are Independent and neither Republican candidate was moderate. Both Begich and Palin are far-right. All current Republican politicians are ideologically far-right except for a handful such as Mitt Romney or Lisa Murkowski. Peltola being an Alaska Native and moderate herself gave her a big advantage in Alaska. The demographics of Alaska have changed a lot since Don Young first took the seat. It is not a Republican stronghold anymore. A higher voter turnout would have only further solidified Peltola's win. RCV or STAR voting would flip several US states from Republican to Democratic or Independent overnight. This is due to the 'red mirage' effect kept in place by low turnout, propaganda, plurality voting and gerrymandering. It makes Republicans seem more popular than they actually are. It convinces voters in those states to just adhere to a conservative GOP status quo instead of voting their conscience. States such as Ohio, North Carolina, Texas & Florida would all see their 'red mirage' collapse if we had RCV or STAR voting, because they aren't truly red states. They are swing states.

[@CT--eo2vv]

The problem is that people are stupid and will never understand complex systems

[@XIIchiron78]

We actually know for a fact that Begich would have beaten Peltola, because Alaska released the entire list of ballots, and Begich was the Condorcet winner. This means that Palin was a spoiler no different than Nader. If Palin dropped out, or voters were more strategic and betrayed their favorite, it would have changed the winner. Does it help you understand to rephrase RCV as just successive rounds of individual FPTP elections? The same problems exist in each round that exist in our current elections. A niche candidate can easily eliminate a more popular moderate who has less first choice support, and then lose to somebody disliked by a majority. This is because unlike better systems, RCV (IRV) only looks at the top rank on any ballot at a time, so your support for other candidates doesn't actually get counted unless you get lucky with the elimination order.

[@iammrbeat]

STAR would have far fewer growing pains imho. I disagree that all Republican politicians are "far-right." That's hyperbole.

[@ThunderTheBlackShadowKitty]

@@iammrbeat I really don't think it's hyperbole at all. I've had it on good authority that the GOP has taken a hard right shift since I got interested in politics in 2016. You can just look at their policy decisions and it speaks for themselves. Protecting police, increasing military budgets, opposing drug use, anti-abortion, anti-LGBT, rejecting climate change, opposing voter reform, opposing medical reform, denying systemic racism, etc. Republicans just aren't the same like they were 30 years ago. They're more far right nowadays. For God's sake they passed a motion in the House condemning socialism. The moderate northeast Rockefeller Republican we all remember is dead. The religious, southern evangelical Republican is the one we have today. Mitt Romney is the closest thing we still have to a moderate Republican, he's basically alone. I think a great example of Republican fiscal mismanagement is Sam Brownback of Kansas. His tax cut experiment didn't work at all.

[@ThunderTheBlackShadowKitty]

@@XIIchiron78 I still don't think he would've won, I think Peltola's win was definitely the right outcome and most Alaska residents I believe will be happy with a Native representing them. Neither Begich nor Palin were appropriate for the position as they are both far-right ideologically and do not fit the political views of Alaska residents. The only reason Alaska elects Republicans is because they have a (R) next to their name like Don Young did, they do it out of habit. Really, Alaska's political views lean far more moderate and even libertarian. Peltola is the actual moderate among Begich and Palin. I don't see Palin as the same type of spoiler as Nader for a few reasons. Firstly, both Begich and Palin are Republican, whereas Nader spearheaded the newly formed Green party. The Green party has always been a left-leaning party, unlike the Republican party. Turnout wasn't particularly high during the 2000 election, and it was known that Gore mostly campaigned without Clinton. Some people say this hurt his chances because Clinton was fairly popular across the country. Gore probably would've won without Nader and if he campaigned with Clinton, but in spite of that, I'd argue Palin was a far bigger spoiler than Nader was. I think Palin was gonna try to run no matter what, she has history in Alaska, but it's good she didn't win.

[@mossydog2385]

Sorry about the double post, but this is actually important. For those who say "why bother, the rich and powerful rig the system, I want to respond. I'm not old, I'm in my 60's but depending upon one's attitudes, 30's can be old, yet I've seen tremendous change between my childhood and now. When I was 10 it was still *illegal* to be gay or to marry outside your race. Women needed their husband's permission to get a credit card or, in some cases, they could not get one at all. People of color were largely disinfranchised and if they weren't, they were "discouraged" by the Klan.....this all existed within my lifetime and they are only a few examples of the enormous change seen between the 1960's....not exactly ancient history....and today, and every significant change that has been made was made by a few people who just wouldn't give up or give in, even though their LIVES may have been in danger. Voting reform is effective and so is activism and today you're very unlikely to have the FBI discredit you and ruin your life, or to be murdered by a racist or racist organization.....so things HAVE changed and they've changed a lot, and for the better and things can still change in transformational ways.

[@Abahrelgazalia]

Click bait title aside, I hadn't thought o the centralized vs. decentralized vote counting before. That's huge and I really should have considered it previously. I have to admit, though, I found the guests overly partisan and hyperbolic talking about instant runoff voting. Things like 'It's just the same system we have now over and over!' Well... yes? I thought that was kind of the point. You don't actually have to change the system (with the political capital that entails), but you make it easier to vote by having all of the various runoff elections happen immediately. And to be clear, the whole 'the middle candidate got squeezed out' and 'you should vote for your last place candidate first to avoid it' is not some magic weird evil quirk of instant runoff elections. It is something that exists right now in our current system, just spread out across multiple elections. Partisans show up to a primary and elect a more extreme candidate who loses the general election. If you know the candidate on your side is seen as more moderate, then you would be incentivized to root for (or vote for if it's an open primary!) the extreme candidate you like least on the other side to help your own candidate win. The difference between instant runoff and our current system is that with instant runoff you only have to go to the polls once rather than twice (or god forbid three times in states with two candidate runoffs in January). Instant runoff elections are better than our current system but still is kind of bad. I know the point was to say 'hey, let's focus our efforts on a better system' but that got kind of lost in the rhetoric. I will say this video, far more than Mr. Beat's original video, has made me intrigued by STAR voting, although I honestly think I'm still on team approval for now.

[@grantlauzon5237]

Hey Mr. Beat, you should tell Destiny (Steven) about this. He’s getting more into canvassing and politics in general.

[@andrewgordon1687]

You should make a shorter video for casual viewers and passers by. It’d definitely be helpful in getting the word out about STAR voting

[@dairallan]

When Orwell described people being denied the language to meaningfully discuss politics, he must have had Americans in mind. People in general DO NOT VOTE for candidates in multi-party democracies (which is the gold standard). They vote for 1. Party, 2. Manifesto and 3. Candidate. Score and Approval voting completely ignore Party and Platform/Manifesto but we have all the empirical evidence we need to know that its Party and Manifesto that matters. AMS/MMS seems to tick the most boxes for a voting system followed by multi-seat STV.

[@LuciusClevelandensis]

The min-max problem on score voting would be reduced by making the scale 0 to 3 instead of 0 to 5. Just a thought.

[@MicaiahBaron]

I think the biggest issue is that you're fighting back against something that barely has any headway as it is, and the alternatives being suggested have no traction at all. If "Stop Ranked Voting" gains momentum it's not going to push us to STAR or anything else; it's going to push us back to Plurality, because politicians never wanted to change anyway. I'm always in favor of reforming up, but I definitely don't trust that the people who jump on this to do so because they want something even better.

[@MicaiahBaron]

I also see their concern about "If the method we're all switching to fails they'll also go back to the old one and be more reluctant to change going forward". It feels like the correct answer would have been to do something else from the start... Hindsight bias is great, isn't it?

[@MicaiahBaron]

The end of the video keeps talking about "The Republican party is the party of freedom" and "Alaska dealt damage to the idea of fair voting as a partisan idea". I, um, hate to be the non-centrist here, but yes, the party that benefits from suppressing fair voting never really cared about fair voting. All they saw was "this is a threat to our ability to stay in power". The Republican party isn't the party of freedom; it's the party of telling non-white males to shut up. Has been for a good while.

[@MicaiahBaron]

"No, not all Republicans, etc" great. Tell those Republicans to loudly condemn other Republicans and stop voting with them.

[@iammrbeat]

You make a good point. The broader movement should be that plurality voting and first past the post sucks. Focus on the problem while we work out the solutions in a more low-key way.

[@sara_wolk]

@@MicaiahBaron Our point was that most people across the political spectrum care about fair elections and leveling the playing field and that a reform that is biased is dangerous and a turn off to all. Yes. we all want our side to win, but there's a line. While many people (and party operatives) have done horrible things to disenfranchise voters, we still hold that most actual voters want a system that is less gameable and more representative. Branding voting reform as a tool to rig elections in our favor is just short sighted and tactically stupid. In Oregon the last Gubernatorial race was the same scenario as Alaska, but in reverse. In Oregon RCV could absolutely flip a statewide blue seat red even if we have a clear blue majority.

[@tylerduncan5908]

2:20:05 literally solving my rubik's cube as she said this lmao I was shook.

[@trentonhenrichson3041]

The claim the RGV requires centralized counting is true. And that does complicate the system for sure. The claim that you can't check the results is only partially true; and the funny thing is the example given proves this. The fact is an outsider (not the central counter) realized the number of votes was too high. There are ways to cross very results they will just be slightly more complicated. I'm just spit balling here but off the top of my head (as a computer engineer) you could have the central location kick back the "new votes" at each round counting from each location it came from. Then each satatlite area could verify the tabulation as its occuring. More expensive... potentially it will take longer. But possible.

[@Sam_on_YouTube]

Our current voting system in MA warns you if your ballot is filled out wrong so you can fix it. It will still do that in RCV. Our election vendor software is already conpatible with RCV. It is not compatible with Star Voting. If MA wanted to adopt Star Voting today, we could not. The machines and software are not available. Our current machines already work for RCV. They would probably work for Star Voting too if the software were available, but the vendor we use doesn't offer it. RCV is better than FPTP and is the only available option.

[@ChrisEly]

Ask your vendor about supporting approval voting first. Then they should contact the equal vote coalition to get help implementing STAR voting as an option. As an ethical organization, I would consider removing both FPtP and RCV/IRV as options, and explaining why.

[@J-K-A]

This is an interesting video and I can see how this solves for ‘most accurate’ but STAR seems easy to exploit too. Like pack the ballet with many more options that as more or less similar. Using their example system, say provide 4 different options for different specific pizza places and then one option for Mexican. You can overwhelm someone with options they can choose between or just get them bored with reading options so by the time they get to a real alternative it’s a selection the voter has exhausted their ability to choose critically and they avoid it. Second, I think STAR only works if we slowly work to it. If not we’ll introduce it to a world that currently really only understands voting as a binary choice. I think voters would likely just give 5 and 0 stars now if we tried to introduce this at scale.

[@eyescreamcake]

Packing the ballot with many more similar options wouldn't harm STAR, you can just give them all the same rating. If voters only give 5 and 0 stars they will be hurting themselves, and will figure that out quickly enough.

[@scottbillhirst9632]

I need to view it. I am an elective officeholder. I don't agree with rank-choice voting. You can sabotage the system if you are a strong partisan by putting those on the other party or views you have with problems with on the bottom of your choices and political gadflies and frivolous candidates ahead of them. Run-offs in most races among top vote-getters are likely the best solution to ranked-choice voting.

[@Sam_on_YouTube]

The thing on election security is BS. The data a precinct has to report is just the result of each ballot. It isn't that difficult. The election machines we use in MA can handle it right now. There is nothing inheret about RCV that makes releasing the full data difficult to release or difficult to check. If people are not releasing the data, that is a problem, but not a problem with RCV. I can manually count ballots on s spreadsheet. Adding in 135K test ballots can happen to any system and should be caught on any system... AND IT WAS CAUGHT. The 135K test ballots WERE NOT COUNTED in the end.

[@ArmyMailmanJesus]

The fact that you used the Maine Policy Institute as a source against RCV worries me. They are basically the Heritage Foundation for Maine. Otherwise, good video.

[@tannerwilson4843]

What would you think of Online Voting like they have in the nation of 🇪🇪 Estonia?

[@b43xoit]

Look up "Liquid Democracy".

[@november666]

STAR voting is pretty much just the linux of alternative voting methods. (I am a linux user, btw)

[@andrewvirtue5048]

Other countries punish people for not voting with a fine. What if we tax the elites and then *_reward_* people for voting by paying them? Paying the voters obviously, not the elites.

[@VodShod]

score voting has an issue with if you know 2 people are rather likely to win and you hate 1 of those you are almost mandated to give the other one a 5 even if you don't care for them all that much.

[@johnkesich8696]

What about a score voting system that goes from -3 (really dislike) to 3 (really like) with 0 being don't know or don't care?

[@ChrisEly]

It's exactly the same as scoring 0 - 6, but depending on what a blank vote defaults to may introduce vulnerabilities for gaming the system. You must default to -3 to not be vulnerable with that range or 0 with 0-6.

[@paulharland7280]

What if every alternative voting system had its own primary open to all candidates and all voters? In the event that one candidate wins all of them we have our clear winner. Otherwise the winners from each system go head to head in a conventional first pass the pole general election.

[@theyoungcentrist9110]

I understand star voting but I’m not there yet to support because I believe ranked choice voting is a bit more straightforward than Star voting since voters know if their first choice has limited support than they can still have the choice to still weigh in on the two final contenders. But what it’s worth, out of all these voting systems I still believe proportional representation such as party list systems, Mixed Member Proportional, Dual Member Proportional, STV and so on would be better system to truly create a more representative democracy in the U.S. But I’m glad we’re talking about all these voting because if there is one thing RCV, approval, score, star voting and proportional representation all have in common is that we are all united to get rid of first past the post voting.

[@yellowgreen5229]

Shame you really deproritized the female participant.

[@welcometonebalia]

Thank you.

[@markphillips3186]

As an Australian I’m more than happy with our electoral system. Federal elections are managed by an independent (non-partisan) Electoral Commission that sets federal seat electoral boundaries avoiding any form of gerrymandering ( the only limitation being to ensure electoral seats fall within state boundaries). Number of seats are based on each state’s population with the exception of our smallest state, Tasmania that has a minimum of 5 electorates. We also have a compulsory voting system (actually is a requirement to attend a polling booth with a minimal fine I’d you don’t). Because it is compulsory the AEC ensures multiple polling booths across all electorates, ensures alternative methods of voting: pre polling day booths; postal votes; telephone voting for disabled;). This ensures both major party alignments fight for the centre rather than fighting to get their supporters out to vote. We use a Ranking System of voting (which we call preferential system). In the past it made little difference and the two major parties dominated the elections. Overtime the electorate, as they gained more familiarity with preferential voting system, the vote split roughly 33/33/33 between centre right, centre left and minor parties and independents at our last federal election. After preferences are distributed one of the two major alignments will get a majority but there have been occasions where coalitions are formed with either minor parties or independents. Our Senate is elected by proportional ranking of 12 seats in each state. This means neither major alignment has a majority in our senate. So there is room for compromise in outcome of voting on legislation.

[@Vampirat3]

You sir , are a good person , and I am directly on the same page as you. I will talk with you later , we should talk.

[@ricardodsavant2965]

All we need are term limits. One term and then get a real job.

[@Ekvitarius]

No, we need to make elections be actually competitive so that newcomers have a chance and older established politicians are actually held accountable. Term limits wouldn’t fix any of that

[@ricardodsavant2965]

@@Ekvitarius -If you say so sir.

[@andrewsomerville5772]

How are complaints about IRV/RCV not the same as what happens in normal runoffs/primary. You can screw yourself by putting your favorite first.

[@Ekvitarius]

They are the same complaints. They even mention at one point, “you can’t solve the problems of plurality by just iterating plurality over and over” (which is what IRV is). The current system is bad, but IRV isn’t a significant improvement on it, which is why we need a better voting system

[@andrewsomerville5772]

@@Ekvitarius I agree overall. They do at one point mention that, but it felt like they were treating the Alaska results as if they were even worse than what would have otherwise happened under FPTP + primary. I get that IRV was oversold as solving the spoiler problem, but I feel like they should have called out the similarity to regular old primary + FPTP would have been about the same.

[@Justin_Beaver564]

Any of these would be better than the current system

[@tomhalla426]

Ranked choice leads to perverse results. No way could Lisa Murkowski win either party’s primary, but she was able to game RCP into a win. Voting against some candidates is a definite goal. Remember Nixon? How would someone rank their votes to assuredly vote against Murkowski?

[@blakekaveny]

Even if it was the regular way murkowski lost the republican primary in 2010 but won as right in. Plus in the open primary murkowski got 45% of the vote.

[@zeanamush]

Next look at how Proportional elections can create Parliamentary deadlock, ungovernable Coalitions, and eternal election cycles.

[@letsgococo288]

Republicans have almost 12 candidates running and you can split the votes how ever you like Trump is still the favoured and loved choice and will take out the top spot.

[@tbrminsanity]

On paper Star Voting is the best system and I understand what you are trying to accomplish, however I feel the system is too complex for the general public. Approval voting offers a better solution overall than Star Voting, not because it is a better system, but because it will resolve the issues with the current system (mainly strategic voting) while being easy to understand. Voting systems are like jokes, you don't need to explain a good one.

[@sara_wolk]

STAR Voting is just a 5 star rating, and two rounds of addition. Add up the stars, then add up the votes. It's safe to vote your conscience. That's honestly as simple as you can get for a fair and accurate reform. Many people see simplicity and a traditional looking ballot as the most important things for actually getting reform implemented, and where that is a viable path we at Equal Vote support and promote Approval Voting 1000%. That said, we do see STAR as the better and more viable proposal long term for a few reasons we don't actually get into in this livestream. Here are the reasons we don't see Approval voting as the one reform that can unite the movement: 1. Approval does ensure an equally weighted vote, which is the legal definition of one person, one vote, but it does so by giving multiple votes to multiple candidates, which means that people who are worried about one person one vote are unlikely to support it without a significant persuasive educational effort (which is anything but simple). 2. Some state's and jurisdiction's election laws and constitutions specify that each voter may only vote for one candidate. Approval is not an easy option in these places (but STAR Voting is). 3. Reformers who are excited by the many promises made by the RCV lobby are unlikely to be satisfied with Approval because it doesn't allow voters to show preference for their favorite, doesn't allow you to show preferences at all, doesn't have as good of a case that it eliminates the need for primaries, and because the reasons it's better than RCV are counter-intuitive. Approval actually counts all the ballot data, and RCV does not, so it *seems* like Approval is collecting less and worse data when in fact it's the opposite. The issue this presents is Approval advocates have to say, "I know you think you want x y and z, but what you really want is q if you look at the data. That's not compelling even if it's true. STAR Voting was invented specifically to deliver on the promises of both RCV and Approval (and Score) so we can deliver what people really want in an election reform while addressing valid concerns with the older proposals. The hope is that this is one reform that can unite the movement behind one great proposal.

[@tbrminsanity]

@@sara_wolk I encourage you to take a blank ballot for several voting systems and show it to your family (especially grand parents and "that uncle/antie"). Without giving them instruction, ask them how the ballot works, and which they prefer. Every time I do this experiment, approval voting comes out on top.

[@baertheblader9402]

I have 2 arguments against STAR voting specifically. 1) Qualitative ratings are very subjective. Two voters with the same opinion about the candidates may vote differently depending on their interpretation of what “5 stars” means. One may give the best, yet overall mediocre candidate a 5 because they are only comparing to other candidates, whereas the other voter may give them a 3 because they are comparing them to a hypothetical ideal. 2) In order for your rankings to count in the runoff, you are forced to give some first round points to candidates you may dislike. Ultimately, I feel that voting is less about how much or how little you “like” a candidate and more about which candidate or candidates you “choose”. That’s why I prefer approval voting with a top-two runoff. Approval levels the playing field by reducing the decision down to acceptable or not acceptable. Since everyone is essentially forced to bullet vote, there is less variation in voting strategy. The runoff allows people to still have a say between the lesser of two evils if it comes to that without needing to give them any qualitative support in the approval round. Similar to STAR, this can be accomplished in a single ballot by using something similar to a Likert scale.

[@galiantus1354]

I also prefer Approval, but I don't really see the issue with your first argument. It seems really unnatural to me that a voter used to voting strategically in Plurality wouldn't intuitively understand that to maximize the power of their vote they need to give their favorite 5 stars. And if this does turn out to be an issue, you could always scale people's vote to have equal weight in the scoring round.

[@baertheblader9402]

@@galiantus1354 I have never heard of the STAR voting methodology including scaling scores. I don’t think that is a thing. Also what is natural to one person may not be for another. If STAR is presented as, “it’s just like leaving an Amazon review for all the candidates”, which I have heard people say multiple times, then I would not intuitively give 5 stars to some mediocre politician. Voting is not about judging or grading the candidates, it’s about choosing a candidate. How much or how little you like them seems irrelevant. Who do you choose? That is what we need to know. If there were only two candidates, we wouldn’t be bothering to use STAR voting, because we don’t really care about their score. We would just use plurality voting. With numerous candidates, we need to narrow it down to two, which STAR does, but I think using Approval to find the two with the broadest support cuts through the fat and the gamesmanship that scoring brings. I am proposing essentially a Likert scale with a clear line between approved and disapproved. It’s less subjective that giving stars or arbitrary points.

[@Alec0124]

1:06:35 - Problem with Ranked choice voting, wasted votes

[@AndrewLugo]

I love this video and this break down I think this panel is phenomenal and I appreciate that you're advancing this much needed conversation. That being said, I prefer approval voting over STAR and the reason is because I think broadest appeal is more important than most vocal supporters, there is a scenario where a candidate with a cult like personality could get their supporters to rank them 5 and everyone else 1 and win even if the majority of the electorate hates them.

[@eyescreamcake]

"could get their supporters to rank them 5 and everyone else 1 and win even if the majority of the electorate hates them" But then it would be identical to Approval...

[@nickvinsable3798]

Well, I swung by the Rooster Teeth convention, RTX, in Austin, TX & I proposed a completely new way of finding people who’re actually qualified to do their job(s) while in office. IF you seriously want to get involved in this, I highly recommend going through Twitter (basically find me in some commonality) & ask them if they spoke to me what my suggestion(s) entailed…