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Right, at a glance this detail makes the system not viable or practical for scaled or official elections, imo.

Also, there are a number of ways to find the top two candidates, (Borda, Condorcet, IRV, etc..) Quantity of support isn't explicit enough.

Another point is that a given voter's support cut-off (ie. Approval Threshold) is absolutely relative to the other options. It's not a concrete thing.

What is the intention behind the proposal? Just a thought experiment?

@psp_andrew-s

2CV now ensures, unlike any other proposed system, that the winner will, under all circumstances, be one who received at least 51% of 1st or 2nd choice votes.

A voters 2nd choice may be as good as their favorite or almost as bad as their last choice. There's no way to know, so ensuring a majority of 1st and 2nd choice votes is meaningless. Also, in any election where you can support multiple candidates there could be multiple majority supported options. The key is to find the one with the most support by looking at strength of support and/or number of voters who prefer them, ideally both.

I think we've already gone in circles about your other responses in previous conversations so I won't repeat that again here.

@cfrank How would you propose doing a ranked ballot with a support cutoff? This sounds simple but I'm not visualizing an elegant or simple way to do that.

@masiarek That's quite interesting, but converting ranks into scores like that rests on some dubious assumptions. So I don't think the score and STAR results are valid.

@psp_andrew-s said in **INTRODUCING** 2-Choice Voting (2CV) - An Improved Iteration on RCV and STAR:

Simple and easy to explain to prospective voters (THIS IS IMPORTANT)

Thank you all for taking the time to comment. I agree with most of the concerns about this proposal that people have already raised. I raised a few of them myself in the Twitter Space where I first heard about it, on Twitter, and also in Open Democracy Discussion.

To summarize a few.

1. I don't think the proposal is simple to explain, implement, or use, nor are the implications or relative benefits transparent.
2. A better voting method needs to be able to prevent vote-splitting and the spoiler effect and this does not.
3. A better method should work in a variety of political landscapes and this does not. That should include crowded fields, primaries, nonpartisan or partisan elections, single and multi-winner races, and many more variables. The stress test elections that are truly competitive are the ones where the system matters the most and failure in that scenario is not acceptable.
4. A better method should not magnify "electability bias" and by extension magnify the influence of money in politics. This one does that because with the limited choice, there's a strong incentive to only support frontrunners, not underdogs.
5. Since first hearing about this method last week I've seen many people spend many hours sharing constructive feedback and patiently explaining some of the central issues with it. Rather than hearing that feedback, Andrew, this conversation seems to be going in circles, so my central concern is that this is derailing in nature rather than contributing something novel and beneficial to the conversation.

Also, I haven't read the paper so don't know how they technically define that criterion, but it doesn't pass it as it's worded in English. Say we have:

35: A>B>Everyone else
33: B>A>Everyone else
32: Everyone else>B>A

Under IRV, B will win this election. That doesn't pass "majority rule, which ensures the election of a candidate from the majority coalition while preventing opposition voters from influencing the choice of candidate from the faction they oppose."

@masiarek said in Condorcet, IIA, monotonicity in RCV IRV:

IRV is the only voting method to satisfy ordered majority rule, which ensures the election of a candidate from the majority coalition while preventing opposition voters from influencing the choice of candidate from the faction they oppose.

I'm not sure that this is even a good thing. If there are two candidates who might win - A and B - why should only people who like A and B get any say in who is elected? Someone might dislike them both, but still much prefer one to the other. I see this as a bad criterion.

@sass said in Ranked Robin Disadvantages -:

As I've thought about it more, if there's a Condorcet Winner, then cloning is irrelevant under Ranked Robin, making it an unreliable strategy.

It's not just about strategy though, as said above. A potentially "wrong" result could still happen by accident.

Also, basically all Condorcet methods fail Participation. It comes with the territory.

Yes, it's very hard for methods to pass it in general. So relative to other Condorcet methods this doesn't count against Ranked Robin.

Moreover, focusing on pass/fail criteria is the issue that caused voting enthusiasts not to achieve real-world progress for 200 years. The question is not "Does this method pass this criterion 100% of the time?"; the question is "How well does this voting method perform on this metric in practice?". Considering that cloning is only helpful under Ranked Robin when there's no Condorcet Winner and that scaled elections without Condorcet Winners are incredibly rare and difficult to predict, I see it as a nonissue.

I agree that overall performance (however one might measure it) isn't necessarily the same as just how many criterion boxes you can tick. However, if a method does fail a criterion, it still doesn't look good if there is another method that is as good elsewhere that also passes this criterion.

And just to set the record straight, I think Approval and Score are great methods. I absolutely support them and would be very happy to see their use in public elections.

That's good. I think they and Condorcet methods have merit.

@Toby-Pereira I was on mobile, so the link didn't copy properly. Here's the section discussing frequency of ties:
https://electowiki.org/wiki/Ranked_Robin#Frequency_of_ties

OK thanks, but I'm not seeing anything to suggest that a three-way cycle would not be the most common tie.

I need to clean up the electowiki page, but the Equal Vote site on Ranked Robin is a much better reference:
https://www.equal.vote/ranked_robin

Thanks for the reference.

@cfrank said in Ranked Robin Disadvantages -:

@sass I appreciate your perspective. However, if the power is concentrated in parties rather than in individual candidates, then election packing is a perfectly valid concern for methods that fail independence of clones. We can’t judge a voting system by the economic landscape reinforced by a different system, it needs to be recognized that market forces will lead to adaptation. I think, personally, that independence of clones is a far more important criterion than participation, for example, since for the most part voter activity is individual whereas party and media activity is more centralized. I would like to see how the members of this forum rank the various criteria in importance (in terms of having a “high probability” of compliance).

I think something like ranked pairs is an excellent single winner system, even though it fails participation. I also think approval voting is excellent, even though it fails the Condorcet criterion (but gets close in a sense). On the whole, my thinking is that proportional representation with some clever system of checks and balances to mitigate block formation would be even more excellent.

On criteria, I would say that participation is very important, or at least it would be if it wasn't incompatible with so many methods. But this is one reason why I like score and approval - they both pass it. What else does? Borda - well that's awful. Then you have Descending Solid Coalitions. and Descending Acquiescing Coalitions. Oh and First Past the Post. Of them, I would say only score and approval are reasonable methods.

But generally, monotonicity and independence of clones are "cheap" enough that I think there's little excuse not to have them.

@jack-waugh said in Condorcet Score:

@cfrank, Ouch!

OK, then, how about this one?

Collect Score-style ballots. If there is a Condorcet winner, elect her. Otherwise, elect the straight Score winner.

I think Smith//Score is better than Condorcet//Score. Condorcet//Score could elect the Condorcet loser.

Or what I was discussing here, which I think is just Landau//Score. But maybe that's getting a bit complex.