Comments on: Pick a Winner

By: novalis

novalis — Wed, 10 Mar 2004 01:33:07 +0000

How can you know the voters’ intent in those ballots unless you know the system they were voting under? You’re assuming that people vote honestly—but there are very few systems under which this is advisable.

By: Matt Brubeck

Matt Brubeck — Tue, 09 Mar 2004 06:28:35 +0000

Jason makes a good point by turning Brian’s queestion around, and looking at who the voters want to lose. Brian says that A and B are “only two candidates with serious support”, but neglects to mention that they are also the only candidates with serious votes against. He biases the discussion by treating first-choice votes as “serious”, while ignoring the last-choice votes. I favor the Condorcet winner C over the STV winner B—and a majority of the voters agree with me. (Assuming, of course, that their votes reflect their preferences. Different election systems would provide different incentives for voters and parties to prefer strategic votes.) By the way, Condorcet ballots can be tallied in lots, like approval ballots.

By: Jason

Jason — Mon, 08 Mar 2004 22:42:11 +0000

Looking back through the archives, I see there really is some disagreement, and people think Condorcet winners are not desired. I’m a little confused as to the reasons why not. Maybe someone will explain (complexity arguements aside). A field of 50 candidates, a few peoples first and everyone elses second favourite choice is A, but the extremists B and C take up most peoples first (and last) choices. I know I’d like A to be picked …

By: Jason

Jason — Mon, 08 Mar 2004 20:42:55 +0000

I thought there was little disagreement as to who should win when there is a Condorcet candidate? C is preferred to any other candidate, so why shouldn’t C win? Wouldn’t a better way of eliminating candidates in a STV type scheme be to eliminate Condorcet losers, rather than just the people who are not the most popular?

By: Kerim Friedman

Kerim Friedman — Mon, 08 Mar 2004 18:21:34 +0000

This is an interesting discussion. I have to admit that the mathematics of evaluating different voting systems is beyond me, but I find Brian’s dismissal of Approval Voting rather odd. Basically, he is saying that he doesn’t like it because voters’ can’t vote strategically – which turns out to be the main “benefit” of AV touted on their website If I remember correctly, Brian’s last post was concerned about how open the Borda voting system was to manipulation. On the AV site, they argue that Instant Runoff Voting as used in Australia has suffered from voter manipulation. Their argument, which I am not prepared to evaluate, seems to be that by eliminating any kind of ranking system, they force voters to vote more honestly in terms of their actual preferences. But Brian rejects this system because it is less easy for voters to manipulate the results to ensure the strategic outcome that they desire. Like I said, I can’t evaluate whether AV delivers what it promises, but it seems that this is a rather strange grounds on which to reject it! Especially considering the origins of this discussion.

By: Daniel Lam

Daniel Lam — Mon, 08 Mar 2004 17:54:11 +0000

Let’s ask a different question: who should lose? The race for most-hated candidate is a simple two-horse race of A vs B. A loses 51-49. After eliminating A, the race for most-hated candidate is still a two-horse race, B vs C. B loses 51-49. In the remaining contest, D loses. So C should win.

By: Brian Weatherson

Brian Weatherson — Mon, 08 Mar 2004 17:14:12 +0000

In modern versions of STV, the point Matt makes is right – you don’t have to rank all the candidates. If all the candidates you give a preference for are eliminated, then you are treated as having not voted. This makes it easier in cases where there are 130-odd (not 250 as I recall) candidates. And in practice you don’t have to redo the count every time. As long as it’s clear who the top 2 or 3 are, and it usually is, you can just count the first preferences and then throw them into whichver bundle they will finally end up in. Theoretically it could be complicated, but in practice it is really very quick. And having physical bundles of votes rather than just tallies (which is all you could have on approval) is so much better for recounts.

By: Wayne Eastman

Wayne Eastman — Mon, 08 Mar 2004 16:57:37 +0000

The real issue isn’t voting systems but preferences. To have voting make sense, you want to have people’s political preferences arrayed on a single spectrum. If voters support the candidate closest to them on a left-right spectrum, voting system paradoxes lose their sting. But you have to worry about a potential for destructive division if preferences are aligned along just one spectrum. And you also have to worry if that single spectrum avoids dealing with certain basic interests—that avoidance may moderate conflict in the short-term but leave the political system detached from reality and vulnerable to destructive long-term conflict.

By: Matt Weiner

Matt Weiner — Mon, 08 Mar 2004 16:25:41 +0000

In STV do you have to rank all candidates? That would solve Rock’s problem, I guess—at least the first, and probably the second (you could just not list all the joke candidates).

By: arcseed

arcseed — Mon, 08 Mar 2004 14:12:21 +0000

“It looks to me like there’s only two candidates with serious support..” I don’t know that you can say that. We only have the order of preferences, not the degree. A could be only a marginally better candidate than C to the ‘ACDB’ voters, in which case the preference of the last two groups for C should probably tip it to C. We can’t know if that’s the case just from the votes, but it’s certainly a possibility. And condorcet does make an awful lot of sense, in the abstract. Approval voting: My understanding is that in the system where you give a candidate a 0-10 score, giving any candidate anything but a 0 or a 10 is wasting part of the power of your vote, making it more likely an unnacceptable candidate will win. Approval voting is the exact same system, constrained so that all voters have to vote strategically. Whether the LibDems are ‘unnacceptable’ or not is something the voter has to decide, but he should still give them either 0 or 10 in the ranking system.

By: Rock Howard

Rock Howard — Mon, 08 Mar 2004 13:37:53 +0000

Let’s say that I really don’t like C and D. I don’t know which I dislike more, but I have come up with some reason for preferring one over the other in a ranked system. Ugh! Then, depending on how the ranked votes are counted, that distinction may not matter anyway. (Most implementations of STV throws away anything beyond the 1st and 2nd ranking and so why ask for that info in the first place?) Now extend this to a large field. The CA governor’s race recently had 250 candidates. How can any ranked system deal with that? As for counting votes, ranked systems have one horribly property. If new votes are “found” late in the process, you have to restart the count from the beginning. With Approval you simple add the found votes to the existing totals. This is a big deal in places where elections allow mail-in voting. See our website for more on Approval Voting. Regards, Robert “Rock” Howard

By: TomD

TomD — Mon, 08 Mar 2004 12:36:51 +0000

A little off-topic, but can anyone explain the Greek electoral system to me? (No-one here has managed yet.) It is a list system with constituencies, and a proportional system in which the largest party doesn’t need a majority of votes to get a majority in Parliament. In other words, a complicated fudge. This may be why I haven’t found any good explanation of its mechanics.

By: Phill Hallam-Baker

Phill Hallam-Baker — Mon, 08 Mar 2004 03:55:01 +0000

You ask who should win but you don’t give us the names of the candidates, their views on the issues or their experience. As Tina Turner said ‘What’s votes got to do with it?’ According to the principles favored by the GOP the winner is the person whose brother appointed the returning officer. Another school of thought is that the winner should be E, who did not stand in the original election but will win a recall election caled a few months later. Then there is the journalism school which does not count the votes, instead it counts the amounts the candidates have raised in contri-bribe-tions. This has the considerable advantage of being measurable before the count itself which from the journalists point of view is much more important than the result. Applying these princples to the current presidential election John Kerry is completely ignored for four months because Dean has raised slightly more cash. And ‘w’ is considered a shoe in because he had $104 million in cash before the $10 million ad buy. The fact that spending $40 million seemed to do little for Dean despite having a much smaller geographic area to cover (the early primaries). Of course W might not be as big a spendthrift as Dean.

By: Brian Weatherson

Brian Weatherson — Mon, 08 Mar 2004 00:41:00 +0000

Right in this case it would only take twice as long to count, but in practice it could take an incredibly long time depending on how many voters mark multiple boxes. I think the quickest way to count them would be to sort the votes first into those that mark one box only and the others. For the one box only group count them as normal (stack then count), and for the others go through candidate by candidate counting sorting them into those that voted for each candidate and those that didn’t, and count each of the stacks. I’d guess it will take roughly 2 to 3 times as long as a regular count (assuming not too many people mark multiple boxes) – but it will be horrendous to do recounts because the votes won’t be presorted. Recounts are always horrendous anyway, but this would make them even worse.

By: Alan

Alan — Mon, 08 Mar 2004 00:38:41 +0000

The precise problem with approval voting is that it forces you to assign equal values to different parties. It resembles the Borda silliness where the value of preferences is determined artifically. Part of the ancient lore of STV is that it began with something like the Iowa caucuses. Voters stood beside the candidate they favoured. If your candidate had a quota you stayed. If not, you moved to stand beside another candidate. Approval voting looks like a simple idea but it’s actually asking faintly weird questions like: ‘Do you support Labor 100% or 50%?’ where those numbers are determined by the number of options, not by the choice of the voter. If the object is a system that excludes the need for tactical voting, it fails.