
Approval Voting versus Instant Runoff Voting - curtis
https://www.electionscience.org/library/approval-voting-versus-irv/
======
fsargent
It can't be mentioned enough that Approval Voting works with existing voting
machines. One of the unfortunate difficulties with IRV is that it often
requires a wholesale replacement of the voting infrastructure. The Center for
Election Science is a big supporter of IRV as a better system than our current
"Choose One" voting method, but we've found that Approval Voting is both more
descriptive and less prone to strategy, as well as being significantly easier
to implement and use.

NB: I'm the Chair of the Board for The Center for Election Science. AMA.

~~~
incog-neato
Is there any real momentum for any kind of change at the US Federal level? Do
politicians talk to you? What's the buzz?

------
schuyler2d
Article makes some good arguments for approval voting, but the "Ballot
Spoilage" argument is a bit disingenuous.

Ballots can't be spoiled in approval voting because any set of circles can be
filled in. However it's a lot easier to _corrupt_ a ballot undetected. Just
fill in more bubbles for your candidate.

~~~
EarthMephit
The argument for "Ballot Simplicity" is misleading too

They seem to have tried to intentionally tried to create a much more
complicated ballot paper for IRV

Here's a sample of an Australian IRV voting form:

[https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/4/48/20...](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/4/48/2016-ballot-
paper-Higgins.png/220px-2016-ballot-paper-Higgins.png)

~~~
notahacker
It's also misleading because the simplicity of the appearance ballot paper
disguises the complexity of the actual choice of how many boxes to tick in
front of you. (Am I better picking my favourite candidate only or both the
candidates I don't find entirely unacceptable in a tight three way race?)

~~~
mcphage
> the actual choice of how many boxes to tick in front of you

With approval voting, you should consider each candidate independently: "Am I
okay with this person winning the election?" The number of circles you fill in
doesn't matter.

~~~
notahacker
But the number of circles filled in by large segments of the electorate matter
hugely, and most people's level of "am I OK with this person winning the
election?" varies hugely, especially when there's a candidate they'd be really
unhappy with on the ballot paper.

------
tromp
It's a bit silly to argue that candidates take up too much space on a IRV
ballot when it would suffice to duplicate only the box and not their name, as
in

    
    
                       1st  2nd  3rd  choice
        John Adams     [ ]  [ ]  [ ]
        Ben Franklin   [ ]  [ ]  [ ]
        Tom Jefferson  [ ]  [ ]  [ ]
        Betsy Ross     [ ]  [ ]  [ ]

~~~
hadrien01
Or just put in a number in a single column boxes like in Australia or Ireland.

~~~
magduf
>Or just put in a number in a single column boxes like in Australia or
Ireland.

What do you do when some moron voter can't count and reuses the same number,
or skips a number? This kind of voting scheme seems like it would much too
complicated and confusing to the average American voter.

~~~
Frondo
Throw the ballot out. People mis-fill ballots now. People will always mis-fill
ballots. The column of numbers thing seems extremely intuitive and wouldn't
baffle a significant number of American voters; certainly it wouldn't lead to
hanging-chad type situations.

------
Symmetry
I really like Wikipedia's page comparing voting systems.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_electoral_system...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_electoral_systems#Comparisons)

No voting system is perfect but Approval Voting is my favorite. Still, most
schemes that people have put forward are far better than the First Past the
Post and there's been some momentum for IRV in Mass, where I live, so I've
been helping with canvassing and it looks like our efforts might be paying
off.

------
incog-neato
I think this would have a much more dramatic benefit toward US politics than
the elimination of the electoral college, adding new US states, or fighting
gerrymandering would.

------
brianolson
What the article misses is that there are alternatives better than BOTH
approval or IRV. I will always find "Approval" to be unsatisfying because I
want to say I like A more than I like B. I will always find IRV to be dumb
because it has bad outcomes and for no additional cost or complexity those
ranked ballots could have been counted by a Condorcet method that results in
better democracy. [https://bolson.org/irv/](https://bolson.org/irv/)

~~~
tnicks
"I want to say I like A more than I like B"

You can convey this by only submitting a single choice on your ballot (a
powerful tactic in AV). Conversely, you can vote everyone BUT the one you wish
to harm. And by default you can vote NOTA. While it may be that Approval
Voting is not the "perfect" answer, it is far better than most and comes with
the added benefit of easy adoption/implementation and simple explanation.

~~~
magduf
>You can convey this by only submitting a single choice on your ballot (a
powerful tactic in AV)

Yeah, but then you run the risk of a Trump getting elected in an election
between Trump, Hillary, and Bernie, where you really want Bernie, and you
really don't like Hillary at all, but you'll still take her any day over the
utter disaster that is Trump.

This is why AV isn't that great: all they have to do is put up a truly
revolting candidate to scare voters into voting for the not-as-revolting
candidate, and she gets elected because there's no way for voters to express a
clear preference.

------
shawabawa3
Does Approval Voting really pass the "favourite betrayal criterion"?

There are scenarios where if you don't vote for both Good and Ideal, bad will
win, and scenarios where if you do vote for both Good and Ideal, Good will win
(over Ideal)

You obviously don't know which scenario you're in when you vote, so you don't
know whether you should vote for both good+ideal or just ideal - both options
can cause a worse result

I suppose the idea is that you use polling to decide which scenario is more
likely and vote accordingly

~~~
kbutler
Yes, approval voting leaves the door open for some tactical voting.

So if candidate #1 would win a simple majority (50.01% of voters), but is
absolutely hated by everyone else, but #2 is "acceptable" or second best to
100% of the voters, should #1 win?

We are used to the binary "simple majority takes all" in elections, but maybe
the compromise "everybody is pretty OK with this one" _should_ win.

If it were a group of friends going to a restaurant, or playing a game, #2
sounds like a much better option.

~~~
foobarchu
I'm not totally convinced that particular compromise should win. The issue I
have with it is whether political candidates should have to please everyone.
Using that strategy would likely lead to a lot of charismatic but ineffective
people getting elected. None of big issues would get any sort of resolution,
because the candidates that the most people are ok with are the ones with the
fewest controversial stances.

~~~
alistairSH
But, the alternative is the dysfunctional partisan mess we have in the US. If
parties split government, nothing gets done (save a lot of finger-pointing and
chest-thumping). If a single party controls government, "progress" is made,
but that progress is likely to be extreme and to the displeasure of a massive
portion of the electorate.

------
zacharyautin11
If only we could use approval voting to vote for a new voting system. Free
elections are not always fair.

~~~
specialist
People hate change.

A few of us have been sneaking approval voting in wherever it makes sense.
Familiarize people with the process.

One example is we use approval voting for prioritorizing our motions during
membership meetings. Previously, our endorsement process was a major food
fight, was way too dependent on the order which motions (from the floor) were
recognized (unfair, yielding results not representative of the membership) and
took way too long.

Now, using approval voting to pre-rank the motions, everyone sees the process
is open, fair, accountable.

------
specialist
Approval Voting is the best balance between fairness and simplicity.

I switched from IRV (RCV) to Approval Voting once I better understood the
challenges of election administration.

That said, FPTP is just about the worst. For election administration, it's the
most brittle, where the margin of error too often exceeds the margin for
winning. So I'd happily support IRV, RCV, score voting, approval voting as a
replacement.

~~~
dj-wonk
I appreciate your opinion, but I want to point out that our definitions of
fairness and simplicity may vary. Much of scholarly work around elections
systems strives to ground itself on particular formal criteria.

~~~
specialist
_" opinion"_

Comparative fairness is well documented. This graph is a good appromixation:

[https://www.electionscience.org/wp-
content/uploads/2018/12/c...](https://www.electionscience.org/wp-
content/uploads/2018/12/comparing_voting_methods_simplicity_group_satisfaction-1.png)

[https://www.electionscience.org/library/approval-voting-
vers...](https://www.electionscience.org/library/approval-voting-versus-irv/)

Simplicity also accounts for election integrity concerns (ease of tabulation
and auditing).

~~~
dj-wonk
Can you share the context for the graph?

Do you have a formal definition for how you are using ‘fairness’?

~~~
specialist
The second link is the article featuring that graph.

Start with Arrow's Impossibility Theorem. You have the maths to better
understand this stuff than me.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arrow's_impossibility_theorem](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arrow's_impossibility_theorem)

[https://www.math.wisc.edu/~meyer/math141/voting2.html](https://www.math.wisc.edu/~meyer/math141/voting2.html)

I have focused on election integrity. For me, arguing the relative merits
ranked choice voting strategies is (unforgivable) bikeshedding and ultimately
results in no action. Like getting stuck arguing 4.5x vs 4.75x better than
FPTP while the world burns.

For election integrity, other real world concerns also must be factored. Like
voter education, verifying the hardware & software, ease of tabulation &
auditing, feasibility of doing a manual recount, etc.

In conclusion, Approval Voting is almost as fair as the ideal Score Voting but
much easier to implement.

------
nayuki
CGP Grey talking about approval voting:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=orybDrUj4vA](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=orybDrUj4vA)

------
a_imho
Sortition is the most democratic way of electing representatives.

~~~
jamesonquinn
Sortition (that is, random selection) is a system for roughly-proportional
representation; that is, for choosing multiple winners for a legislature so as
to represent a population.

Approval voting is a way of picking a single winner.

They solve entirely separate problems.

(Sortition is nearly optimal if your only goal is to match the distribution of
voters by a subset of equally-weighted representatives. Technically, it's
possible to improve on it slightly by allowing voters to cluster themselves
into a hierarchical structure of parties and factions, then performing
sortition under the constraint that each party and/or faction must come within
1 seat of its correct proportional representation. This kind of technique is
called "reduced-variance sampling" when used in sequential monte carlo
sampling.

But sortition, or party-clustered sortition, pays no attention to candidate
quality. Most people would agree that if there are two candidates that hold
the same ideology, but the only difference is that one of the two has a
medical problem that only allows them to work for 1 hour a week, the other one
would make a better representative. Sortition cannot be fixed to take this
kind of factor into account, which is a big part of why many people prefer
more traditional voting methods.)

~~~
a_imho
One can most certainly pick even a single winner at random.

Equal chance to represent, there is no fairer way than that.

Voting inherently leads to a money/campaign/popularity contest (and parties,
more often than not 2), it is very good at keeping the status quo by feeding
back to itself.

I'm not aware of any large scale studies of election method preferences, but
keep in mind 1. people are used to voting 2. even if they are aware fairer
methods exist their self interest is to keep voting if they think they will
benefit from the resulting unfair system.

------
PaulHoule
Yep, IRV sends you right into the jaws of Arrow's Theorem which is not a nice
place to be.

~~~
dj-wonk
Arrow’s Impossibility Theorem, as I understand it, applies quite broadly to
voting systems. To put it simply, you can’t avoid it. You just decide what
trade offs you want to live with.

~~~
jamesonquinn
Arrow's theorem applies only to ordinal voting methods. Approval is not
actually subject to Arrow's theorem; it's not even well-defined whether it
passes the criteria.

However, there are various voting impossibility theorems inspired by Arrow
which do apply to approval. Most notably, Gibbard-Satterthwaite.

------
dsfyu404ed
As a libertarian anything that increases the ability of a 3rd party go gain
traction interest me but something smells very off about the recent uptick in
discussion of alternatives. If these changes were actually beneficial to the
underdog in the general case you'd see them being pushed by the left or the
right on a state by state basis depending on the political make up of any
given state. The parties aren't run by idiots. They've crunched the numbers.
They know whether the alternatives would benefit them or not. Likewise it
makes me very uneasy that we mostly only see people who align with one party
pushing for alternate systems.

I'm not opposed to alternate voting systems but I'd like to see one actually
increase the power of the underdog(s) in a one party state (the only kind of
state where the powers that be feel secure enough to make this kind of change)
in the US before I support one. I don't want something that sounds good but
furthers the status quo. Political diversity is one of the US's strengths and
anything that furthers the status quo is bad for that.

Edit: why is this opinion unacceptable?

~~~
lupire
The main benefit of FPTP, for third parties, is that they can hijack elections
by acting as "anti-tiebreaker" (Threatening to turn their nearest ally into a
lose by joining the election, unless that nearest ally adopts their platform).
This is why third parties generally (and openly) advocate for FPTP.

Of course, the simple and well-tested solution is to reduce the power of the
Executive, move power to Parliament, and assign power proportionally to
parties.

~~~
barry-cotter
> The main benefit of FPTP, for third parties, is that they can hijack
> elections by acting as "anti-tiebreaker" (Threatening to turn their nearest
> ally into a lose by joining the election, unless that nearest ally adopts
> their platform). This is why third parties generally (and openly) advocate
> for FPTP.

This isn’t true in the U.K., the only country where a third party recently
tried electoral reform in a country with FPTP. The Liberal Democrats wanted to
get rid of FPTP.

~~~
notahacker
True, but then the Lib Dems were succeeded by UKIP as the third party and the
electoral threat they posed to the Conservative Party was a significant factor
in putting moves to leave the EU onto the Conservative Party's agenda despite
its leadership's reluctance.

Of course, without skewed vote shares due to FPTP and with a limited choice of
realistic coalition partners for a future government, that third party can
achieve exactly the same thing through coalition bargaining anyway.

------
DebtDeflation
It seems to me that Approval Voting might have the unintended negative
consequence of electing a joke candidate, since you do not rank your choices
nor are you limited to how many you can choose. Unfortunately, many voters
would not give a second thought to ticking "Mickey Mouse" or similar in
addition to their main choice and alternates, since there is no tradeoff
involved. Under IRV or Ranked Choice, few voters would likely rank the joke
candidate high.

~~~
dj-wonk
But there is a downside, by your own logic. If you vote for a candidate that
you disapprove of (don’t want to elect), you run the risk of increasing their
support.

------
jnty
Surely this disenfranchises those most willing to compromise, who are probably
going to end up being those who support small parties?

Let's say you a Right and Left party, and breakout Far Left which is actually
very popular but has previously lacked electoral support due to its 'outsider'
status.

People's favourites might look like this:

Right: 30% Left: 30% Far left: 40%

However, 75% of Far Left favourites actually vote for Left too, because they
prefer them to right. This ends up with the following result:

Right: 30% Left: 60% Far left: 40%

So we are left with 'establishment' mediocrity instead of the most popular
result.

Is this OK because a majority of people don't actually want 'far left'? Maybe.
Intuitively though, I think taking preferences away will freak people out,
particularly in situations where there might be different levels - what if
there was a Far Right party that Far Left voters _really_ don't want in -
would some end up voting for Right to avoid that happening? They might win
despite having 70% unpopularity!

I'd prefer difficult counting processes over a blunting of people's democratic
will.

~~~
incog-neato
"Left" and "Right" are nearly meaningless when people can have stances on an
issue-by-issue basis. As someone who has important disagreements with both big
US parties, some would call me a moderate, and I feel disenfranchised by the
current system, which doesn't let me pick the person whom I agree with most.

~~~
jnty
They're merely labels. You can imagine 'far left' as 'centrist'. I was going
to name them A, B and Z but wanted to get across that Far Left voters might
prefer to compromise on Left than Right, but might prefer Right to Far Right.
Clearly this is going to be a more nuanced decision in real life.

