Ranked voting - Making third party viable or letting people vote more then once?

[Tastes_of_Chocolate]

@Icarus

On the second point - By your own description, all (rather than some) people would get up to 3 chances to vote. Because of this it is applied fairly to all voters.

Voter number 1 votes : Candidate A, Candidate B, Candidate C
Voter number 2 votes: Candidate Z, Candidate Y, Candidate X
Voter number 3 votes: Candidate D, Candidate E, Candidate A

Eventually Candidate A wins the election, but not before Candidates Z, Y and X were all eliminated. Candidates B-E survive the count, but do not reach the 50%+ level.

So what it came down to was:
Voter #1 voted for Candidate A, and the vote stayed there.
Voter #2 was first counted for Z, but when that didn’t work out, they were counted for Y, and when that didn’t work out, they were counted for X.
Voter #3 is counted for C, and the vote stays there.

Sure, when the final tally is added up, #2’s vote only counts in one place, but in effect, their vote was considered in 3 different places. Why should they get 3 shots at “getting it right” when the other two didn’t?

[BlinkingDuck]

Just use Approval voting.

Vote for as many candidates as you wish. The one with the most votes wins.

[Kearsen]

My question is when do we really “believe” in three different people running for a political position, ever?

[Giles]

@Cunctator

This voting method has been in use in Australia since the 1920s.There have been plenty of examples of strong, local independent candidates getting elected in Australia as a result of preferential voting. I had one in my own electorate for a numbers of years. He never scored an absolute majority on first preferences, but he gained sufficent second preferences from the major party voters to win ultimately.

An example from the most recent NSW state election in March 2007 was in the inner city seat of Sydney, where the successful independent candidate won on the back of preferences from both left-wing and right-wing voters.

This system of voting has been used both at the state and federal level in Australia for a long time. A more interesting seat in the 2007 state election in NSW was Newcastle, where the sitting Labor member was denied preselection by the party and stood as an independent. There was another strong independent candidate, who was also the Lord Mayor of the City of Newcastle, and the Greens tend to do well in the electorate, because it’s an inner city seat. There was a Liberal candidate (the Liberals are the opposition party in NSW, and might be in government after the next election, the way things are going), and four other candidates.

After all the preferences had been distributed, the official Labor Party candidate won, on these figures.

Before preferences, the results were:
Jodi McKay (Labor) – 31.2% – a swing of 17.1% against the party
John Tate (Independent, and the Lord Mayor) – 24.1%
Bryce Gaudry (former Labor, now independent – 21.0%
Michael Osborne (Greens) – 11.2% – a swing of 4.2% against the party, with most of those 4.2% probably voting for Gaudry
Martin Babakhan (Liberal) – 9.8% – a swing of 16.4% against the party, with most of those 16.4% probably voting for Tate
And 2.7% among the other 4 candidates.

On those figures, depending on how preferences went, any of the leading 3 candidates could have won the seat – but it was won by the leader on first preferences, who had two candidates on her left, and two candidates on her right, so was the “moderate” candidate.

(And note how:

1. the main opposition party came 5th, with less than 10% of the vote, and
2. both major parties had a swing of 16 to 17% against them, with two strong independent candidates running).

[Grumman]

@Tastes_of_Chocolate

Sure, when the final tally is added up, #2’s vote only counts in one place, but in effect, their vote was considered in 3 different places. Why should they get 3 shots at “getting it right” when the other two didn’t?

Because the goal of voting isn’t to be a massive example of game theory and guesswork, it’s to select the best candidate. Effectively penalising any candidate that happens to be too close to another candidate (even if the reason they are close is because it’s the right choice) is stupid. If there are a hundred candidates who oppose DADT and one that supports it, why should the opposition have to split the anti vote one hundred ways while the other guy gets the full benefit of his supporters?

[Tastes_of_Chocolate]

@Grumman

Because the goal of voting isn’t to be a massive example of game theory and guesswork, it’s to select the best candidate.

No, the goal of voting is to allow the voting population to select who will fill the position. There is nothing in there about “best”.

[Giles]

@Tastes_of_Chocolate

No, the goal of voting is to allow the voting population to select who will fill the position. There is nothing in there about “best”.

Yes: it’s not the best candidate that should win, but the candidate preferred by most voters.

The problem is to determine who is “preferred by most voters”. That’s easy if one candidate is preferred by more than 50% of the voters, but not so easy otherwise.

Preferential voting is not perfect, because Arrow’s impossibility theorem demonstrates that no voting system can be prefect, but it is a system where everyone’s vote counts equally, and where the candidate finally elected has a majority, and not just a plurality, of votes.

[KellyCriterion]

To the people who are saying that ranked voting allows you to vote more than once: Do you at least understand that whoever wins an election under a ranked voting system can not receive more than one vote from one person?

[KellyCriterion]

And a follow up question:

In Italy (I believe this is the case in Italy, or it could be Germany), the public vote for their president by having two elections about two weeks apart.

In the first election, a whole bunch of candidates run, and voters can turn up and cast one vote for one candidate. At the end of the day, all votes are tallied, and the two candidates with the highest amount of votes…

… go in to a run-off election 2 weeks later, where once again all voters go to the polls, but this time, they can only choose between those two candidates.

Now, would you say a flaw in this system is that it allows voters to “vote more than once”? Because, functionally, ranked voting is no different to the way elections are run in Italy.

[BrainGlutton]

@KellyCriterion

And a follow up question:

In Italy (I believe this is the case in Italy, or it could be Germany), the public vote for their president by having two elections about two weeks apart.

In the first election, a whole bunch of candidates run, and voters can turn up and cast one vote for one candidate. At the end of the day, all votes are tallied, and the two candidates with the highest amount of votes…

… go in to a run-off election 2 weeks later, where once again all voters go to the polls, but this time, they can only choose between those two candidates.

Now, would you say a flaw in this system is that it allows voters to “vote more than once”? Because, functionally, ranked voting is no different to the way elections are run in Italy.

Which is precisely why “ranked voting” is better known as “instant-runoff voting” – it produces results similar to a runoff but avoids the expense of a second election.

[Giles]

@KellyCriterion

Now, would you say a flaw in this system is that it allows voters to “vote more than once”? Because, functionally, ranked voting is no different to the way elections are run in Italy.

It’s not a bug/flaw: it’s a feature. In both systems, all voters can vote more than once. It’s just that voters for the two leading candidates vote more than once for the same candidate.

[Chronos]

Quoth Tastes of Chocolate:

Sure, when the final tally is added up, #2’s vote only counts in one place, but in effect, their vote was considered in 3 different places. Why should they get 3 shots at “getting it right” when the other two didn’t?

Voter 2’s vote is counted three times, but voter 1’s vote is also counted three times, as is Voter 3’s. Everyone’s vote gets counted three times. What’s the problem?

[Noel_Prosequi]

Others have mentioned Australia, and I concur that it works pretty well in most cases. The position is slightly complicated by the fact that we have compulsory voting, and so a high percentage of protest votes are informal (ie, invalid). In addition, some elections require that, for a vote to be valid, there must be a ranking against all the candidates, some (optional preferential voting) allow you to go down the list only as far as you want. The former makes the “one vote-one value” argument stronger, the second caters for people who can’t bring themselves to “vote” at all for a particular candidate, even if it is the last vote.

In practice, each candidate provides a “How to Vote” card to everyone who wanders up to the polling booth (yes, this is a huge waste of paper). The candidates will have each calculated their best option of game theory outcomes combined with issues of supporting like-minded candidates and the inevitable horse-trading processes involved (“I’ll recommend my second preference to you and in return, if you win and I don’t, you will enact policy X”). Each candidate thus comes up with an order for the punter to follow which makes it all easy enough, although there is no obligation to follow the how to vote card, and any voter is free to put the candidates in any order they like.

An unfortunate consequence of the process, however, is that the counting process takes a long time. Unlike POTUS elections, where the result is known pretty much straight away as a result of the use of machines and so on, allocating preferences and counting has to be done by hand, with scrutineers at hand. It can take weeks for individual seats to be decided, and recounts are a nightmare. Of course commonly one party wins handsomely, but not always, and the details of who has won which seat can be a drawn out process.

The consequence of all this is that we pretty much have the stability of essentially polarised political parties such as one sees in the US or the UK, but there is a capacity for subtle differences. Thus, there are two conservative parties (Liberal and National) and two progressive parties (Labor and Green) each at a slightly different position on the Left-Right spectrum, and there is no real penalty for this either by way of the Nader problem or by way of an instability problem because in the end the Parliamentary system requires them to get on, and they do.

A significant downside to our system is that the process for calculating Federal Senate votes results in disproportionate power going to minority parties, but that is not a consequence of preferential voting but of other aspects of calculating the Senate vote which are irrelevant to the OP.