Which of these options are you favorites? Rank up to 5 options:
https://www.rcv123.org/ballot/9T1G8AJZDeRPZiWJwWaKsB
You may also answer and discuss here, but only the votes in the link is counted for the purposes of this survey.
Why am I doing this? Because I missed the polls from [the website that shall not be named], so I wanted to experiment a bit here. And what better way to do polls than the best way! I hereby present you to the Ranked Choice Ballot! Ta-da! (Please go vote, I spent a lot of time on this)
Edit: If you don’t want to vote, here are the results from all the votes so far:
Ranked choice is probably the worst option for a poll like this…
I’m betting if you ran this exact poll under different rules, say multiple choice allowing unlimited selection, you’d get a vastly different answer.
This is because Ranked Choice is a horrible voting system. If First Past the Post wasn’t so bad, RCV would have the title of worst system ever created.
Hell, the site you linked even has a “pros and cons” section where they even admit to the massive problems with the system but then hand wave them away.
Ballot exhaustion alone is a showstopper. They pretend that the voter “just didn’t choose someone popular enough to win” when the reality is much more insidious. The most common form of ballot exhaustion is when your 2nd or 3rd choice is eliminated in the first round, and then your 1st choice is eliminated in a later round.
And because of how votes are counted, if you had put your 2nd choice in the 1st slot, they could have won the election, even if they were not your literal favorite.
Up to 20% of ballots cast in RCV elections are thrown out due to ballot exhaustion. That’s enough votes to massively shift who wins or loses.
The basic truth here is that RCV is good at one thing. Preventing fringe candidates from spoiling an election between two front-runners. It can prevent another Bush v Gore, but that’s it.
Also, in real world use, it’s fucked up several elections.
Due to the need for centralized counting, the 2021 NYC mayoral race had 130,000 extra votes that turned out to have been test ballots that should never have been in the same location as the actual election ballots.
https://www.thecity.nyc/2021/6/29/22556830/nyc-board-of-election-pulls-preliminary-mayoral-results
Centralize counting and an overly complex system also resulted in the wrong winner being chosen in California. The wrong winner was sworn in and served in the position for a full month before the error was found.
https://www.sfchronicle.com/bayarea/article/Alameda-County-admits-tallying-error-in-17682520.php
There are vastly better options than RCV.
You can read up on them here. https://www.starvoting.org/
And here, https://electionscience.org/
So if you were to choose the best system for multi-candidate voting that would work for most real-life elections or multiple-choice rankings, which one would it be?
There’s also Single Transferable Vote.
Here is an alternative Piped link(s): https://piped.video/l8XOZJkozfI
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I’m open-source, check me out at GitHub.
Absolute best would be STAR.
https://www.starvoting.org/
A good runner-up would be Approval.
https://electionscience.org/
Came here to take a silly poll about drinks, came away with some actual interesting reading about better election methods. Thanks man. A shame this will never change in the US but one can dream…
Thanks for the links. I’ve heard of star, but approval is new to me. I’ll read up on those
Approval is super easy and can be used at small scale, and at large scale too.
But here it is in less than 2 minutes.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=orybDrUj4vA
Doing it at large scale, is just scaling it up. And the great thing is, it easily handles as many options as you throw at it.
Here is an alternative Piped link(s): https://piped.video/watch?v=orybDrUj4vA
https://piped.video/watch?v=orybDrUj4vA
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I’m open-source, check me out at GitHub.
i appreciate the strong passion and education about the poll on everyone’s favorite beverage
I’m trying to figure out the pros and cons of the STAR Voting method versus the pros and cons of the STV method. Can anyone help fill me in?
Do you have 3 hours?
This live stream explains it all.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O-dzK3YIAf8
The TLDR, or TLDW here;
The difference between RCV (also called IRV) and STAR is the difference between an Ordinal system and a Cardinal system.
An Ordinal system is a ranked system. Chose one or the other, but never both. A vote for A means you cannot also support B. This lead to some math shit that actually gives preferential treatment to two party systems.
RCV claims to support third parties and solve the spoiler effect. The truth is the opposite in every way. It eliminates fringe parties that would spoil elections, but also falls prey to spoiler effects when you have very similar candidates. It’s actually a mess.
STAR on the other hand is a Cardinal voting system. A vote for A is a vote for A and a Vote for B has no impact on A. A good example is saying that I give Chocolate Milkshakes 5 out of 5 stars and New Coke 1 out of 5. But here’s the main difference to an Ordinal system, I can also give a Banana Smoothies 5 out of 5 stars. Because I’m rating them as individuals, not in comparison to each other.
STAR is literally a 5-star review of the candidates, and the two with the highest average (or just highest scores) are then put head to head. Each ballot is then looked at, if Chocolate Milkshakes are rated higher on any given ballot than Banana Smoothies, Milkshakes get the vote of that person. If they’re the same, a vote of No Preference is logged, and the No Preference votes are also made public at the end.
No no, I was asking about the differences between Single Transferable Vote and STAR - not RCV/IRV.
RCV is the single winner version of STV.
Every single fault of RCV is present in STV, but because it’s a multi-winner format, the complexity and lack of transparency in the counting process are far worse.
If you really want proportional or multi-winner elections, then a better option is this.
It’s based off of Score the same way that STAR is, but tweaked to be multi-winner.
Ah, okay - thanks for the explanation.
I do like the idea of multi-winner elections because of the increased chance of having a representative for your specific issues taken to a national assembly. In the UK things are split up into boroughs, which seems illogical for cities and aside from being grandfathered in likely only persists because it enables gerrymandering.