Ka-Ping Yee

Shortly after the 2016 election I did some research into election and social choice theory. First-past-the-post is clearly the worst system possible. But ranked-choice also has strange artifacts where voting for your actual favorite as your first-rank choice means they might have a lower chance of winning.

A much simpler method in my opinion is approval voting: the ballot instructs, "Who do you think would perform the duties of the office to your approval? Check all names that apply." Then whoever gets the most checkmarks in aggregate is the winner. No spoiler effect, easily-understood vote tallying system, and reflects true approval in the population of voters. It can be adapted to multi-seat races just by taking the top n winners.

Ka-Ping Yee simulated elections using a number of recognized methods for counting votes[1]. I believe that the best system will be one which is easily-understood at the ballot box and behaves as similarly to the Condorcet method as possible. According to these simulations, it appears that approval voting is the best.

No election method will meet all the requirements for an ideal one[2] so it comes down to which conditions you want to enforce and which are less important. IMO, monotonicity is very important while the later-no-harm criterion can be interpreted as a compromise which is necessary for strategic voting.

[1] http://zesty.ca/voting/sim/

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arrow%27s_impossibility_theorem

FWIW most experts now favor approval voting [1] over ranked choice. Approval voting has similar advantages as ranked choice in allowing 3rd-party candidates and favoring moderate candidates. It avoids the chaotic behavior that RCV can exhibit [2] where shifts in the order of voters' down-ballot preferences can very significantly alter the outcome of the election [3]. And it's also much easier to explain to voters ("It's like voting today, except you vote for everybody you'd find acceptable and the best candidate wins. Sorta like when you're picking a restaurant to go out to with friends - you go to the place that is acceptable to the greatest number of people, not the one that a minority really want to go to"), doesn't require that you reprint ballots (you can re-use normal FPTP ballots, but you just count all votes instead of disqualifying ballots with multiple candidates marked), and is easily adapted to proportional representation and multi-member elections (you just take the top-N best candidates instead of the top-1).

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Approval_voting

[2] http://zesty.ca/voting/sim/

[3] https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1o1byqi/comment/nijpxci/

I'm continually upset and confused by Instant runoff voting's popularity. IRV is, by my reckoning, a much inferior (and more complicated) system than other systems, like range voting or ranked pairs. And it has some bizarre properties that make me wonder if it is even worse than the traditional first-past-the-post.

One property of IRV that makes it so questionable is its non-monotonicity. This means that you can help a candidate by ranking them lower, and hurt a candidate by ranking them higher. It is extremely easy to visualize how ill-behaved IRV is in the charts on this website:

http://zesty.ca/voting/sim/

Meanwhile, ranked pairs (a "condorcet" method) has the property that, if candidate A is more popular than all other candidates pairwise, then candidate A will always win. This is _not_ true in IRV.

If you're interested in falling down the rabbit hole of electoral systems, I recommend looking at this chart that compares their properties:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_electoral_systems#Comparisons

I don't know whether you'll see this belated reply, but anyway: I have had some sympathy with your position, as you can see in my sibling comment, BUT as I read more about IRV, I am actually coming to disagree. Look at this page, especially the chart near the bottom: https://electionscience.org/library/approval-voting-versus-irv/ What this says is that in simulation, given mostly tactical voters, IRV doesn't do any better than PV (FPTP). This surprised me, but I'm starting to see why, as the rest of that page explains.

Here's another: https://www.rangevoting.org/TarrIrv.html The most telling argument here, I think, is that a century of IRV hasn't freed Australia from two-party domination.

Another page with simuations: http://zesty.ca/voting/sim/

What voting reforms have been attempted in your province?

> IRV result is worse than the plurality result

Huh? There isn't a clear-cut way of determining the best voting system, so how were they compare the two? That matters quite a lot.

There are situations where IRV get so complicated it is unpredictable, but living in Australia that does sometimes feel like a feature - if the polity expresses no strong consensus preference, random selection amongst candidates is not a bad idea.

> Approval voting and range voting are ... strictly better

Yeah, totally [0]. Approval voting looks like the one to use just in terms of doing what a voting system does.

Any system that lets neutrals and moderates in occasionally is better than plurality. And plurality is streaks ahead of having no choice at all.

[0] http://zesty.ca/voting/sim/

It doesn't matter. Hare/Instant Runoff voting (deceivingly marketed as "ranked-choice voting" in the US) neither empirically [0] nor theoretically [1] improves the viability of third parties.

Honestly IRV is worse than plurality so there are plenty of reasons to oppose it other than a two-party domination conspiracy theory. Using IRV gives up monotonicity, possibilities for a distributed count, and some elements of a secret ballot (for even a medium-sized candidate list) for basically nothing.

Monotonicity is not a theoretical concern. Alaska almost immediately ran into a degenerate case [2].

[0] https://rangevoting.org/NoIrv.html

[1] http://zesty.ca/voting/sim/

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2022_Alaska%27s_at-large_congressional_district_special_election