Jonathan B
Comments23
Note that there are other organizations promoting consensus voting systems, too, with the same proposed benefits:
- Better Choices for Democracy advocates Consensus Choice Voting, a Condorcet-compliant form of ranked-choice voting.
- STAR Voting Action advocates STAR Voting, a hybrid of cardinal and ranked systems.
- Equal Vote Coalition is an umbrella that advocates all of the above.
caveat: there's a disparity between intrinsic and instrumental preferences, in other words voters don't actually know what they want.
There's a disparity between "utility" in the context of a voting system vs "utility" in the context of EA. In other words, what voters want is not necessarily what best improves their actual wellbeing. Is that the same disparity you're talking about, or something different?
Ranked Choice Voting is a good way to reduce polarization in politics, elect more popular (and less extreme) candidates, and increase competition. It would also reduce the power of Trump over the Republican Party, which could lead to more Congressional pushback.
Since the form of RCV used in the US eliminates candidates bases on plurality tallies of first-choice votes in each round, it arguably does none of the above and just perpetuates the problems of our current system. It does not fix vote-splitting or the spoiler effect, despite the claims of its proponents.
Ranked-choice systems that actually count all voter preferences ("Condorcet-compliant") would actually improve these things, as would cardinal systems like Approval Voting, STAR Voting, Balanced Approval, etc. that allow voters to evaluate each candidate independently.
Yeah, the decision to select the top three candidates and divide funds between them is pretty arbitrary (and unlike a standard political election) but I think most people would agree that counting all voter preferences in that process is better than counting some voters' preferences while discarding others'.
If you count all voter preferences, instead of only first-choice rankings, the set of top three winners is the same, but in a different order and with different proportions:
- SWP (33.7%) > EAAWF (33.1%) > RP (33.2%)
In the future can you add these orgs? They are similar to Center for Election Science:
- Better Choices for Democracy advocates Consensus Choice Voting, a Condorcet-compliant form of ranked-choice voting.
- STAR Voting Action advocates STAR Voting, a hybrid of cardinal and ranked systems.
- Equal Vote Coalition is an umbrella that advocates all of the above.
OK I ran the numbers on the raw data. IRV happened to select the correct top 3 candidates, so that worked out OK, but it did not select them in the correct order or proportions (but it's pretty close, so it doesn't make much difference in this particular election).
The official results are:
- RP: 37.0% = $9484
- EAAWF: 32.3% = $8271
- SWP: 30.6% = $7844
But when considering all preferences, not just first choices:
- SWP was actually the true winner, preferred by 50.3% majority of voters over RP, by 50.9% over EAAWF, by 56.4% over WAI, etc.
- EAAWF is runner-up, preferred by 50.2% over RP, by 57.2% over WAI, by 59.8% over THL, etc.
- RP is third, preferred by 54.9% over WAI, by 59.2% over THL, etc.
I don't know of an established way to translate this to proportional winnings, but you might choose to break it up by pairwise margins between the top three, like this:
- SWP: (50.9+50.3)/3 = 33.7% = $8636
- EAAWF: (49.1+50.2)/3 = 33.1% = $8473
- RP: (49.8+49.7)/3 = 33.2% = $8490
The majority preferences between the top three are pretty close to even, so something that evenly distributes money between them seems intuitively correct.
Actually, real name accounts produce comments of lower quality than those made by pseudonyms:
https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2012/01/real-names-dont-make-for-better-commenters-but-pseudonyms-do/251240/
https://web.archive.org/web/20160516101013/https://disqus.com/research/pseudonyms/