Maine used ranked choice voting in the last presidential election, the first state to do so:
https://www.themainewire.com/2020/09/maines-high-court-rules-rcv-must-be-used-in-presidential-election/

I'd love to see other states follow suit (whether with ranked choice, approval, or whatever) but I'm concerned that most states wouldn't do it because they are likely to conclude that it is against the interests of the majority of the voters of the state.

I don't know if I have this right, so I am curious if others see a flaw in my logic.

If there are really only two main candidates in the general election, it shouldn't matter if it is FPTP or not. But let's say there is a third candidate that is popular and had wide appeal, drawing voters from each major party candidate. In other words, a candidate that could actually win under a "good" voting system.

The last I remember this happening was Ross Perot. In June before the election, he was the front runner, with 37% favorability compared to 24% for both Bill Clinton or Bush Sr. So a whole lot of people liked Perot most, but ultimately were discouraged from voting for him because they didn't think he'd be a front runner. Instead they strategically voted for either Bush or Clinton.

Perot got 19% of the votes, but of zero electoral votes since those 19% were spread pretty evenly across the country. In some states he came did come in second place, one of them actually being Maine, where he barely edged out Bush.

Now, imagine a state like Maine having RCV in that election. In that case, Perot might well have won Maine's electoral votes, if people ranked their choices sincerely. He would have a lot of first choice votes, but also have a lot more second choice votes than other candidates (since he was seen as more of a centrist). In fact, Perot got more votes than Bush in Maine under FPTP, so I'd say it is extremely likely he would have won under RCV.

But what that would do is result in Maine give their electoral votes to Perot, while the front runners nationwide were Bush and Clinton. Since the majority of Maine voters preferred Clinton to Bush, having RCV would have very likely caused their electoral votes to be wasted, rather than casting them for Maine's preference between the front runners.

Am I missing something here? And if I am right, is there any better way to implement a better voting system in a single state, when the rest of the country is using the old one?

@sass Yes that gets to the point quickly. I like.

This seems similar in spirit to the one I was proposing recently. The main difference is that mine used cardinal ballots (intended to be identical to STAR ballots, such as if the STAR people might want to offer a Condorcet version of STAR). But otherwise it was like yours in that it ran pairwise matchups first, and if there was a tie, fell back on the simplest way to resolve it.

So your single sentence could change one word and describe mine:

Among the candidates who tie for winning the most head-to-head matchups, elect the candidate with the best average score.

https://www.votingtheory.org/forum/topic/130/star-like-method-reverse-star

That said, I think yours makes more sense for pitching it to Yang's crew, since they seem to like ranked ballots.

@Marylander said in Sensible Rules for Recall Elections:

However, the simplest solution would be to simply hold another election where the governor and potential replacements are all just treated as candidates, as they would be in an ordinary election.

Agree, although I think it should also require any candidate that replaces the governor to beat the governor by a certain amount. The low threshold for ousting someone who has been elected doesn't make sense. California's system is severely broken, and was a huge expense that was completely unnecessary.

Although, in the end, Newsome and Democrats probably benefitted from it this time around.

@cfrank Well if I understand you correctly, you're suggesting that the state not be "winner take all."

The problem is that not being winner take all is also against the interests of the majority of the voters. If they were to distribute their electoral votes according to the ranking, it will dilute the state's influence.

Interestingly, Maine is one of two states that doesn't have winner take all currently, but distributes them according to congressional district. (I think I see a pattern.... Maine seems to be rather foolishly non-selfish )

But yeah there is the other perspective you mention that party platforms may consider the interests of the state when putting people on the ballot, and that may balance it out so it isn't really against their interests? I don't know.... it's a hard problem to analyze.

@Jack-Waugh said in Evaluating Single-winner Systems From 2021-10-18 Until the Next Major Discovery:

And yes, by "case," I meant an example starting with true voter sentiments, then proceeding through strategy.

I stand by the example I provided in the other thread. I think many voters on the left, with imperfect knowledge but behaving reasonably and realistically, would have been much more likely to lower their vote for Gore in 2000 due to Nader entering the race under both Score and STAR. Under Score, that would have significantly hurt Gore, under STAR, it wouldn't have. To the extent that Warren Smith's short article discusses money's influence (which I personally think is a stretch to say that better voting methods address that), I stand by that Score would be worse than STAR, since under Score a candidate like Nader would be more discouraged from running for reasons I noted.

My priorities are a good bit different than yours. Polarization is the main issue that I think is problematic under our current system, and I am genuinely scared that we are on a path toward another civil war in the US due to polarization caused by both the voting system and by social media so quickly emerging as a way people get their information about the world.

@Jack-Waugh said in Evaluating Single-winner Systems From 2021-10-18 Until the Next Major Discovery:

Marketability is important, but I think we have to predict performance first

Ok. As I said in another thread, systems that require or strongly incentivize strategy are very hard to predict due to the "hall of mirrors" effect, with each voter trying to guess what other voters are going to do. STAR and especially Condorcet methods address this. I don't think you can easily "predict performance" with Score. The system seems to be designed for you to vote in a way that is counter to good strategy, leaving it as an exercise in psychology to predict -- far more so than on better systems.

And STAR has more momentum than Score, the latter of which has been around for a long time and to my eyes, is dead in the water.

@marylander said in What are the strategic downsides of a state using a non-FPTP method for presidential elections?:

if the Perot electors would matter and they are not legally required to vote for the candidate to whom they were pledged .... they could choose between Clinton and Bush

Yes, that is better than nothing. But it does get weird in that it is letting the electors, rather than the electorate, determine the outcome.

I'm curious if it would be possible to actually enshrine it into law what happens in that scenario. It would be fairly simple if it was only one state, but if there were multiple states doing it, it isn't so straightforward.

What if it were an interstate compact, in the same spirit as the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact (NPVIC) ? Say a few states joined it, and agreed to have the election using a ranked method. They agree to combine all the votes [1] determine an ordered ranking, then pick the highest ranking candidate that is one of the two front runners nationwide. [2]

I would suggest that doing it this way would very likely be in the interest of the states in almost any way of looking at it, and might well give those states outsized influence. Which would in turn cause other states to want to join.

1. possibly weighted according to their electoral college votes, so a state like Wyoming and California could both join without Wyoming losing its advantage due to its high electoral votes to population ratio
2. This would need to be carefully worded. It's possible that, considering only the "non-compact" states, Bush Sr. and Bill Clinton would be front runners, but that it was close enough that Perot (the compact states' choice) could still win. In that case the electoral votes of the compact states should go to Perot.

@Marylander Codepens aren't running arbitrary JS on the actual site, they are running it in an iframe that is embedded into the site and can't communicate with the JS runtime within the site.

If they allowed people to, for instance, steal your login credentials (e.g.. read your document.cookie and then post it to a random URL), Codepen would have never even considered making them run embedded in forums. I can assure you they carefully considered the security implications and architected it in a way that prevents such things..

@jack-waugh What happened?

@Jack-Waugh For one, defeating two-party dominance doesn't happen just by creating a great system. You also have to sell that system to the public. I'd take Score in a heartbeat over our current system, but I don't think it is marketable due to its strong incentive to be strategic. Especially with its "dirty little secret" which is that to vote most effectively under Score, you simply ignore its costly feature, which is to vote with "in between" values. The smart voter under Score will typically give either a minimum or maximum value to each candidate. When people figure this out -- and it would become quickly apparent to everyone as soon as Score starts to gain momentum -- they aren't going to like it. "Why pay more for a dimmer switch when the light bulb really only works when it's all the way on or all the way off?"

So my goal is to offer a system that is as predictable as possible. And that means, make it so hard to gain an advantage by being strategic, that the vast majority people won't bother. I think any Condorcet system accomplishes this, and STAR does as well (although I think STAR may still incentivize strategic nomination, which is a problem).

I don't know what you mean by "what case shows...?" Are you looking for an example, a study, or for us to "make a case" for our particular system?

Regardless, for the most part, I am not really trying to make a case against Score, because I don't think Score has many people still arguing for it. Most of its fans have either joined the STAR camp or the Approval camp, or are possibly doing what I am doing and seeing if there might be something yet considered, that is more likely than either of those to gain widespread traction.

@culi said in votevote.page is live:

If you want to limit yourself to red/green/blue/other basic colors you totally can!

Gotcha. To be clear, I wasn't suggesting limiting to basic colors like that because that defeats the whole purpose. My suggestion would be pick the colors purely visually from a palette (a small 8x8 palette for 64 colors would be perfect), or using a color picker. If you use a color picker and it shows the RGB values that are used in the proximity calculations (preferably with gamma applied so it is more realistic per the linked video), people will know what 'color proximity' actually means, so I'd consider that a huge plus.

Expecting people to set up a custom dataset is fine, if it's that kind of app. If you want to have something that quickly communicates a concept though, not the approach I'd use.

Obviously it's your app and you can handle it as you want. I actually love the idea of using colorspace to represent ideological space, BTW.

@culi said in votevote.page is live:

If you want to limit yourself to red/green/blue/other basic colors you totally can!

Gotcha. To be clear, I wasn't suggesting limiting to basic colors like that because that defeats the whole purpose. My suggestion would be pick the colors purely visually from a palette (a small 8x8 palette for 64 colors would be perfect), or using a color picker. If you use a color picker and it shows the RGB values that are used in the proximity calculations (preferably with gamma applied so it is more realistic per the linked video), people will know what 'color proximity' actually means, so I'd consider that a huge plus.

Expecting people to set up a custom dataset is fine, if it's that kind of app. If you want to have something that quickly communicates a concept though, not the approach I'd use.

Obviously it's your app and you can handle it as you want. I actually love the idea of using colorspace to represent ideological space, BTW.

@culi Maybe true but I wouldn't rely on names at all, especially if you are using them in ways that go beyond simple visual. (i.e. "distance" between colors)

Regarding the video about how RGB blending is wrong due to gamma... that's true, although I suspect of minor importance in this scenario. But you could certainly do the conversion prior to comparing colors for proximity.

For your purposes, though, the gamma issue is pretty minor importance. If you are doing graphics stuff such as a paint program, much more so. The important thing here is to have it communicate to people who want to mostly think about voting theory, not color theory. (I say this as someone who has spent far more time working with and thinking about color theory than voting theory)

Whether or not you account for gamma, it is still RGB, though, and I think that's rather important. Other systems tend to have degenerate cases, as black white and gray in HSV. Hue is indeterminate for black, for instance, but near blacks would have a hue. So #000001 and #010000 both appear as black on most monitors, but have very different hues meaning they are treated as not-particularly-close colors. The significance of hue should be reduced as the saturation is reduced.... and that is true for RGB systems.

If you want to get even better, you can account for the fact that certain RGB colors (whether or not you've done the above d-gamma-ing) appear lighter than others even if their RGB sum is equal. Pure blue (#0000ff) is much darker-appearing than pure green (#00ff00), at least on monitors. (less so if printed with an ink jet). So you could distort the cube to account for that, like how the Munsell color model is distorted to put yellow at a higher value than blue.

Notice that in Munsell, the physical distance in the color solid is a good indicator of similarity of colors. However, the way Munsell numerically represents the colors (which is HSV, but not the simplified form used in most computer representations), would not be a good way to determine similarity, since it amplifies the importance of hue with low saturation colors.

It's great to allow users to have options, but for the vast majority of the users that don't spend a lot of time thinking about color theory, try to go with what is most intuitive: if colors appear similar, treat them as similar.

You spoke of color names, and that is a different issue. Personally I wouldn't use any names, or stick with simple ones (red, yellow, green etc) rather than expecting people know what is meant by "seafoam". I go to the beach often enough to know what the color of seafoam is, and it ain't that.

Yup! This is supposed to be an exploration of the ways to count votes itself and not at all model real life elections

Sure but strategy is sort of at the heart of all this stuff. You can simplify it, as I did with my simulators, but ignoring it altogether, seems quite misleading to me.

@culi Was just playing around with it and a bit confused on one thing: FPTP and Veto seem to produce almost exactly opposite results. I understand that the methods are opposite in a sense, but that shouldn't mean that the most common first choice in one is going to be the most common last choice in the other. I suspect that you are tallying them wrong.

The same issue applies to VFA (for and against). Candidates that get lots of positive votes seem to also get a similar number of negative votes. That seems unlikely.

Regarding colors: I think you should stick with RGB rather than mixing HLS into your distance formular. RGB treats it spacially, so a middle gray candidate should approximate the median (right in the center of the RGB cube). I'd think that's what you'd want. HLS is weird in that hue is cyclical, and it is going to see colors like gray with a slight tinge of yellow and gray with a slight tinge of blue as being pretty far apart, since their hues are so different (even if they are very close to each other in any color space), while pure yellow and pure blue are going to be very close in saturation even though they are polar opposites in any color space.

I tried creating a gray candidate, and they performed very poorly with all methods, even though you'd think they'd do well on most methods (being in the middle of color space / ideological space).

On to a bigger issue: are you assuming the candidates are voting entirely naively? For instance, in FPTP, do they simply pick their favorite candidate, rather than factoring in how likely they think it is for each candidate to be a front runner?

Monarchs are also subject to selection by how good they are at defending themselves against foreign threats. Europe was almost constantly at war as one monarch tried to take land from another.

@tec said in Collaborative Coding for Simulation:

My preferred method (which generally requires computer simulation for any realistically sized electorate) is to represent voters as points in an issue space (usually 2D or higher), and use a distance function between the voters and the alternatives (also points in the issue space) to generate ordinal or cardinal ballots.
......
This is also similar to what @rob did in the underlying electorate model in his voting strategy simulation

Yes that is exactly what I do. The thing I do that isn't realistic at all, though, is that I simply spread the voters around with a random distribution, rather than having any clustering at all. That said, most of the clustering in US politics today is, in my opinion, caused by the voting system itself. Duverger's law and such. So I erred in the opposite direction, and assumed that it was spread evenly among the electorate. The orange/gray/blue dots below represent voters in "issue space" (or "ideological space"). The crosshair simply indicates the median value of X and Y.

I use 2 dimensions rather than more because it is easier to show on screen, as well as just being the right level of complexity to illustrate concepts to people (which I prioritized a bit higher than making it fully realistic). Both candidates and voters have an X and a Y value. When talking about it, I usually consider X to mean "left vs. right", both in a geometrical sense but also political. (so I can talk about "voters on the left" indicating liberals/democrats, at least in the US politics sense)

In addition to X and Y values, voters have another property which is "how strategic they are." This is shown in the color: orange is fully strategic, blue is fully sincere. I use this in a simplified, but not totally unrealistic way: those that are the most strategic vote as if they know for sure who the two front runners are, those who are most sincere vote as if they consider every single candidate equally likely to be elected. Those in the middle will vote as if some in-between number of candidates (say, 4) will be front-runners.

Meanwhile, candidates (large colored dots with a letter on them) have a property beyond their X Y position in issue space, and that is what I call "universal appeal." This can include things like their appearance, their speaking skills and debating skills, their intelligence, and so on. Basically, those things that are deemed good regardless of what a voter's position on issues are. So candidate B above has higher universal appeal than others, while candidate E has lower universal appeal. This is shown by size. (note that the video I shared earlier did not have this as I hadn't implemented it yet)

Notice that I have also added one more thing to the simulation, which is the "Raw" scoring in the output. (at right)

This is not calculated based on any vote, but just by determining the average "voter satisfaction" at their being elected. I consider this to be an indication of what is the best winner actually is. This only works because the app has the ability to essentially read the voter's minds --- for the actual voting methods, the app can only look at their ballots.

It is expected that the raw scoring "method" will tend to give the candidate nearest the median (i.e. the crosshair) the highest score. More or less. And this assumes that all have the same universal appeal.

I haven't yet tried to do Condorcet methods, STAR or IRV, since strategy is so much more complicated for them.

(the app in its current form -- i.e. unfinished -- is at https://pianop.ly/voteSim/voteSim.html . To use it, first click "make voters", then click around to place candidates, then click "vote". You can delete candidates by clicking on them, you can adjust their universal appeal by mousing over them and using up and down arrow keys, or by using the "default UA" slider prior to placing them)

@marylander said in Collaborative Coding for Simulation:

Usually in Condorcet, strategy involves trying to force a cycle. But you will then have the task of determining whether doing this is beneficial for you.

Yeah my feeling -- and it is more of a feeling than anything I've been able to mathematically reason -- is that for a normal voter to try to do this is going to be beyond their capabilities. They might try, but they are probably equally likely to do something has a negative effect as to have a positive effect. And if it does have a positive effect, it will be an extremely subtle one.

This is nothing like how under other systems -- such as FPTP, Approval, and Score -- simply knowing who the two front runners are dramatically helps you to vote effectively. Even being able to narrow it down, say from a field of 8 to a field of 4, makes a big difference.

@jack-waugh Sounds really difficult to do in a way where it is actually good strategy. For instance, how do you determine if a candidate is popular? Does it mean "likely to be elected under the current method?" Because that by its nature needs to be iteratively solved. (well, that's the only way I can think of to solve that). And then, how do you determine how good voters are at guessing how others will vote? Do they all have equal ability?

I also have trouble imagining how you decide what voters go in what faction, in anything approaching realism, unless you do something along the lines of what I did which is give each voter (and each candidate) a position in "ideological space", which I simplified into a 2-dimensional space. Note that in the latest version I also gave candidates a "universal appeal" property, so it wasn't only about proximity to the candidate in ideological space.

Finally, I don't know how to algorithmically do strategic voting under IRV or Condorcet. It seems like a voter needs to be able to guess with a great deal of precision how others will vote in order to effectively rank the candidates in anything other than your sincere preferences.

@jack-waugh Yes I find imperative styles easy to follow especially by the less experienced. setTimeout() is to allow for the animations.

I'm curious what approach you are using to simulate strategy. Is it purely based on being able to guess the front runners, "hall of mirrors" style (as mine is), or something else?

@jack-waugh
I'm not sure what you are looking for regarding a "strategy function" but you can look at how I implemented strategy for a few methods in my simulator.

This video does show code, and if you want you can look at the code in the actual app (which has been improved / expanded since I made the video), here it is:
https://pianop.ly/voteSim/voteSim.html

Youtube Video

(also, I'm not sure how this is particularly relevant to the JavaScript question. I mean, any language should be able to do whatever algorithm you come up with, right? )

The way I implemented strategy is pretty simple. Basically, I assume that voters would attempt to guess who would be the front runners, and vote accordingly. So if it is approval and you know that the winner will be one of four candidates out of ten, you approve all candidates that you like equal to or better than the average score you give each of those four candidates. (a bit simplistic, but reasonable)

The trick is how to know who will be the front runners. And to do this, I just iterated, having everyone voting with the above algorithm, then narrow down the candidates. And it iterates until it stabilizes. Some voters were "more strategic" than others, which simply meant that they were able to narrow it down further. So the least strategic would vote as if all candidates were front runners, while the most strategic would narrow it down to two. My simulator showed the progress by animating the sorting of candidates, slowly enough that your eyes can sort of follow it. (it shows how strategic each voter is by the "warmth" of their color: oranger is more strategic, bluer is less strategic)

Not sure if that makes sense, but feel free to watch the video and play with the app and look at the code if you want.

I did sort of the opposite extreme of putting each voter into a faction. I just spread them over a 2d ideological spectrum with a random distribution. I don't think that is perfectly realistic, and think a little "clumping" would improve it. But I never got around to that.

One of these days I'll put some more work into the app. I'd like to do IRV but that one is tricky strategywise. I am not convinced that a good Condorcet method would have any reasonable strategy beyond ranking them in your order of preference. So I only did approval, FPTP, score and for and against, all of which have a fairly straight forward strategy if you know which of the candidates is in the running.