mccJul 11, 2024

What is your favorite alternative voting system?

[Notes: • If you vote in one poll in this thread please vote in all of them • For a real world example of what I mean by "Multiround runoff" consider the French system]

Condorcet
15.8%
Instant Runoff
48.6%
Approval
23.3%
Multiround runoff
12.3%
Poll ended at .
Show threadmccJul 11, 2024

What is your favorite alternative voting system? (Poll #2)

[Notes: • If you vote in one poll in this thread please vote in all of them • For a real world example of what I mean by "Multiround runoff" consider the French system]

Condorcet
21.1%
Instant Runoff
39.2%
Approval
20.6%
Multiround runoff
19.1%
Poll ended at .
Show threadmccJul 12, 2024

What is your favorite alternative voting system? (Poll #3)

("Instant Runoff Voting" is when you rank your choices and a multiround runoff is simulated by bumping off candidates one by one and redistributing their votes. "Approval voting" is when you get checkboxes by each candidate and can select more than one; whoever gets the most "approvals" wins.)

Instant Runoff
73.3%
Approval
26.7%
Poll ended at .
Show threadJames WidmanJul 12, 2024

@mcc which one is better at expressing my desire to see one of the candidates eliminated?

i.e. if we have an election where there are 3 candidates, X, Y, and Z, and to me, the most important thing is to keep candidate X out of office, which voting system does a better job of supporting that priority? (If i *also* get to express my preference for Y vs Z, that's an added bonus.)

Show threadmccJul 12, 2024
@JamesWidman This is an excellent question. In my opinion it is IRV. Condorcet advocates insist that Condorcet does eliminate the need for strategic voting, which to me would imply the property you ask for, but when I do the math that's not what I see. I do not know if this means the Condorcet advocates have missed something, or if it means I did the math wrong. I'm kinda inclined to the second theory, but my point is I'm not sure.
Show threadBerkubernetusJul 14, 2024
@mcc @JamesWidman have you published anything with that math? As someone who works on voting systems, I'd be very interested
Show threadmcc

@fuzzychef @JamesWidman Uhh, that'll be here https://msm.runhello.com/p/category/video-games/goty You'll notice each post in this category, over time, got less and less certain about the accuracy of the Condorcet.

It looks like I didn't publish the outcome of my "real condorcet" test. I remember it being really slow (my implementation was PHP+SQL and there were over 150 options in the poll)

I might have also published the poll software somewhere, I don't remember. This was a while ago, the poll ran yearly from 2003-2013.

Run Hello » Game of the Year poll

Jul 14, 2024 at 7:43pmWeb
Show threadmccJul 14, 2024
@fuzzychef @JamesWidman Also hm the 2013 post may be missing from the blog? Whatever.
Show threadBerkubernetusJul 15, 2024

@mcc @JamesWidman I would suggest that if you have a poll with 150 options, Condorcet is not a good voting algo to use. It's really designed for elections with 3-16 options, where a large number of voters might conceivably rank all options.

I wouldn't be surprised at all if a case of 150 options, with 95% of voters ranking only 10 of them each, causes condorcet to produce unpredictable results.

Which gives us the general mantra: choose the vote tally method that suits your poll.

Show threadmccJul 15, 2024
@fuzzychef @JamesWidman Yeah, that sounds about right to me. As I remember, the point where Condorcet started to seem weird was when it had to produce a relative ranking between two candidates which never appeared ranked on a single ballot simultaneously. Borda, of course, could do this without any conceptual difficulty.
Show threadBerkubernetusJul 15, 2024
@mcc @JamesWidman That's why a lot of Condorcet voting tools mandate ranking all candidates.
Show threadmccJul 15, 2024
@fuzzychef @JamesWidman 🇦🇺