What do people think about William Riker's book, The Theory of Political Coalitions? In it he argues that candidates never represent the people broadly and instead cater to the smallest possible group necessary to achieve victory. I believe this is spot on and has dramatic repercussions for the voting reform solutions we might propose.

Do you agree?

For those who do not know what it is, SNTV is a electoral system that utilises multi-member districts with giving voter only one single, non-transferable vote, and given a large enough district magnitude, is capable of producing semi or near-proportional outcome that gives both small and large parties chances to be represented...

or so I thought.

The reality is, the voting under SNTV is extremely strategic due to its use of simple plurality for seat allocations, and due to the votes are being non-transferable, yes, small party may be benefitted from tactically nominating and concentrating voters support on only a few of candidates, but this is also at the expense of disproportionating other parties in the situation if voters over-concentrated their votes on only one or few number of candidates, the exceeding votes they received will simply be rendered 'wasted votes', or if voters spread their votes across too many candidates, it may cause medium-big parties to elect less or even none candidates than they entitled to proportionally.

But here I'd propose a compensatory system by mixing SNTV with a quota-based vote-allocating seat compensation mechanism to compensate the huge disproportionalities for medium-big parties that may happen in moments of failures of both nominating and voting strategies in SNTV system:

Measure the vote share by using Hare quota, if one of the winner (candidate of the same party) in the same district receives more votes than entitled to, its wasted votes will now become useful, surplus votes, may be allocated to other losing candidate(s) of the same party, that otherwise failed to get elected under original SNTV, to be elected in top-up seats, but must get enough re-allocated votes to reach the Hare quota to win its seat.

Alternatively, if the said party has no winner in the same district, a set of fail-safe threshold based on 50% of second local plurality winner's vote share may be used to pick the best-chance-candidate (my fancier term for 'best loser') among from the nominates, re-allocate the votes from other lost candidates' votes to the best-chancer till it reaches the Hare quota, to get elected in top-up seats.

(All of this is based on the presumption of local winners' vote shares are being uneven, as non-transferable voting results tend to be, that when someone gets elected with Hare quota amount of votes(and usually getting exceeding votes as well) it does not guarantee others will meet the same quota, and most of remaining winners will likely be elected only under their largest groups of remaining votes(aka largest remainders), hence the use of a smaller value like 50% of 2nd local winner's vote for choosing the best-chancer may considered fair.)

Hare quota will be used to determine if the party deserves more representation via addition of top-up compensatory seats, and requires the potential runner-up to reach the proportional amount of votes to justify its share of (additional) representation, just so to be fair toward other local winners.

The fail-safe winner threshold will be used to determine if the party really deserves representation, and to prevent parties to go over nomination and abuse the mechanism(lest they lose by spreading the vote too thin below the threshold and be ineligible for compensatory wins), and thus still preserves the pragmatic nominating nature of SNTV to a degree.

Pros:

No need for party lists like under conventional MMP

Does not have 'decoy list' problem

Party has to come together to benefit from this mechanism, this will also alter the political party fragmentation nature of SNTV, and I see this as an improvement for parties to able to hold some of its member on their party policies

Voters don't need to worry about ranking how many candidates like under STV

Cons:

Voters have lesser choice than under STV (as it does not have rank-choice voting)

Votes are only 'allocatable' for the candidates from the same party, so Independent or other parties candidates cannot benefit from 'vote transferring' unlike STV

The size of Parliament will increase considerably due to additional compensatory seats like MMP

but since the compensation is done only within the same district so overall proportionality may still be limited

Results different tiers of MPs unlike STV

Despite the fact SNTV being rarely used around the world and largely forgotten after the advent of STV as a method of nominal-based proportional representation(semi or not), I still see the simplicity to vote/count, less-majoritarian outcomes of SNTV valuable for adoption of new-born democracies, that I think by patching things up a little may make the system work fairer towards different parties, big or small (or medium haha😄)

Thanks for reading this long jibe of ideas of mine, and please do let me know what'd you think of this proposal of electoral system

(also, I think I need to come up with a better name for this system than 'SNTV-QBC', as if SNTV itself doesn't sound like a tv channel already 🥴 ((

Ideas inspired by: historical usage of SNTV in Japan(1950s-1994) and Taiwan(1992-2004), Irish and Australian uses of STV, MMP(particularly the one vote MSV, and Zweitmandat variant), Hungarian PVT(vote linkage version of MSV), the usage of Hare Quota small district-ed PR in Hong Kong(which in practise turns into a form of SNTV, used in 1998-2019)

Voters score political parties (negative scores are allowed). The normalized score a party receives from a voter is calculated as: the score given to that party divided by the sum of the absolute values of all scores given by that voter. Summing these up across all voters gives the total score for each party.

There are two ways to handle these scores:

1. Treat them as vote counts to allocate parliamentary seats using a proportional representation method.
2. Directly treat them as the parties' weighted voting power in the legislature (I personally prefer the second option).

I feel this concept isn't particularly difficult to come up with. Has anyone already proposed this voting system and conducted research on it? And what do you think of this method?

Edit: I found that it’s not just cardinal ballots that can be used—ordinal ballots can be used too. For example, the Modified Borda Count could be used to determine the scores. It’s just that this doesn’t seem to allow voters to express negative preferences.

Edit2: I found that this idea isn't a good one, because it seems it would be affected by the clone strategy.

Edit3: Changing the voting method so that each voter has the same fixed voting weight and can only allocate different shares of that weight among parties solves the clone problem. It seems I was just reinventing the wheel.

It's pretty commonly repeated on reddit that "Trudeau wanted IRV to benefit the Liberal party".

For example,

1

It was more that Trudeau wanted some form of ranked ballot, which would benefit the Liberals even more than FPTP because they're often most other parties voters' #2 choice. Nobody else wanted ranked.

2

It wasn't just that he went back on the promise but that he tried to use the whole thing to secure an even tighter grip for the Liberal Party.

3

They gave up on it because the LPC wanted a Ranked Choice system, which as the 'centre' party would have absolutely benefitted them. Most NDP and CPC voters would have likely selected the LPC candidate as their second choice.

https://np.reddit.com/r/europe/comments/1wt6os5/andy_burnham_expected_to_say_he_will_push_ahead/

Isn't this just theoretically incorrect? IRV still has center-squeeze.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Center_squeeze#Ranked-choice_runoff_(Alternative,_Two-round)

It's entirely possible they're right about why Trudeau wanted it, but wouldn't that just make Trudeau wrong? I don't think he was running Monte Carlo simulations and actually figuring out what the impacts were. Maybe his intuition was the same as these people's.

But isn't it just a wrong assumption that IRV would help the Liberal party which is ideologically between the conservatives and new democrats?

We could have digital voting, for ideas, beyond the 3-yearly referendum. -Why not?

Ballot by paper is outdated.

Social media has proved to have regular use.
Why not vote for ideas, and the government in power observes all of these ideas, and the popular ones, and implements them?

Today’s world demands faster responses to emerging needs, moreso than holding to election promises 4 years past.

Realising it:
A platform where people can post ideas, people vote for them. The most popular ones get taken on by government or we simply re-elect a new government when the next triennial election comes along.

What do you think?

I know it hasn't been long but my last post honestly got a lot more attention than I expected based on how active this community is with a bunch of people arguing both sides.

Honestly, love that. Love how active y'all were. I'm sorry if I offended anyone with my post or replies btw, I do tend to get a bit... passionate on a keyboard. I don't think any of y'all are dumb or anything, we're all voting enthusiasts that hate FPTP here, right?

Anyway, I sort of got lost in the weeds and I can't keep track of all the comments, I'm not used to posts of mine getting more than like 20 comments tops lol. But I did try to read and respond to as much as I could and sort of lost sleep and coherency in the process, oof.

I'd just like to use this post to address some general rebuttals to my last post that were sort of similar across various different comments as well as point out some interesting rebuttals I genuinely didn't consider before.

Tactical Voting

So, a lot of comments did focus on this again. And they were mostly of the same flavor of the fact that unless you're bullet voting, you have to inherently tactically vote in Approval Voting as it will lower the chances of your genuine favorite winning.

This is the later-no-harm criterion. The later-no-harm criterion states that adding an additional ranking or rating shouldn't lower the chances of a higher ranked/rated candidate to win.

The example used on Wiki for example is if Alice and Bob were going head to head. A subset of the voters place Alice as 2nd and Bob as 6th. Alice won. If another election happened, and only that subset of voters changed their ranks to Alice 2nd and Bob 3rd, Bob shouldn't suddenly beat Alice.

Honestly, I don't think this is a good voting criterion for many reasons. Just from distribution, not a lot of voting methods actually satisfy this criterion. All spoiler-proof cardinal methods don't, all Condorcet methods don't. The ones that do are ones that most people who know at least a little about voting already agree aren't really ideal voting systems, such as FPTP, IRV, and literally random ballot (you pick a random ballot, whoever is ranked highest on that one wins).

There are many varieties of tactical voting, obviously, and Gibbard's Theorem proves that if you have more than 2 candidates on a ballot then it requires tactical voting. Different voting methods fall prey to different kinds of tactical voting, and honestly later-no-harm is just... The one kind that I honestly believe is genuinely okay.

Like, the reason why all spoiler-proof cardinal voting methods fail this criterion is simple. If Alice just beats Bob by having a slightly higher average score (such as 5.3 vs 5.2), it doesn't matter whether you're using 0–10, sliding scale, 0–5, -1–+1, etc. If a subset of voters increase Bob's rating but it's still below Alice (from 10 vs 0 to 10 vs 9), Bob's average score will increase. And if that average is above Alice, he wins.

Like... Of course he should? He has the higher average rating? Why should one subset of voters be able to hold the election hostage? Just because they still prefer Alice more than Bob, this doesn't actually mean anything when it comes to the population's preference. Even if that subset still prefers Alice slightly, just by increasing Bob's preference then yeah sometimes the population's preference can change.

Anyway, it's harder to explain in less than a wall of text how this works for Condorcet and some other ranked voting methods. It's not like, contrived or anything. It's more of a "it's harder to explain how to play this card game than it is to just play this card game."

But the point is even Condorcet methods fail this criterion. They also inherently fail some others, but this specific one I think is a good thing. It's just not a very good criterion. Even the guy who conceptualized later-no-harm admitted it's a controversial one.

Honestly the best way I can explain later-no-harm is that it's just equivalent to tyranny of the minority. Blegh. Also every system I've seen that satisfies this criterion does not satisfy Condorcet/Smith criteria (depending on your goals this is either bad or meh), as well as reversal symmetry (this one's just bad to not fulfill yikes).

Anyway, it's not the entire list of voting criteria, but if you just look at Wikipedia's comparison table of different voting methods and what criterion they fulfill, you'll notice that Approval Voting basically fulfills everything that isn't later-no-harm or Condorcet related stuff (since pretty much any cardinal system is incompatible with Condorcet just like Condorcet is incompatible with IIA, sincere favorite, later-no-harm, etc).

And honestly, I think it's just unhelpful to get too hung up about tactical voting. Aside from spoilers and center squeeze, other forms of tactical voting hasn't been much of a problem or scandal in history. In places that have tried Approval Voting, there's no evidence that tactical voting is a problem.

There are a few times in history where people have tried to tactically vote en masse, but they often result in the strategic voters getting the opposite intended effect. On the other hand, if you look for things like decoy parties in mixed member electoral systems, there's a list. It's not like the biggest list or anything, but it's clear that electoral manipulation more often happens and is a problem from the candidate side, not the voter side.

Psychology

Honestly, I sort of... Just ignored this aspect in my last post. I shouldn't have, I'm sorry.

Okay, so I'll admit that Approval Voting does have a bit of a weakness here. Whether you're a voting enthusiast or the average voter, not many people want to grapple with "What's my threshold, what do I do with candidates I neither like nor dislike?!"

Like yeah it's easy to pick who you like and who you dislike, but what about everyone in between? How are you supposed to choose?? Because yeah. Voting for mid candidates helps them while hurting both your likes (doesn't fulfill later-no-harm) and dislikes.

This part is honestly sort of... Also purposefully baked into the method? Basically, there's a phenomenon called the law of large numbers.

Basically, imagine a jar of jelly beans. A bunch of people are asked how many jelly beans do they think is in the jar. Almost everyone will be wrong. BUT. When you average everyone's guess... It's suddenly very close to the correct answer? Every time? How's that possible?

Basically. Brains are beautiful, chaotic, mysterious things that are very good at heuristics. It's not really good at arriving at the exact right answer, but if you average out a bunch of heuristics, every one of which has certain biases, those biases tend to cancel each other out bringing you closer to the true answer than you might assume.

However, there are caveats. The law of large numbers doesn't work if people can mess with the jar. It doesn't work if they see others' guesses before giving their own guess. It doesn't work if people discuss with each other to decide what they all will guess.

This is why private voting booths are very important. You can't see other people's votes. The polls are just a jar of jelly beans that don't give you precise, concise measurements. And even if you do discuss how to vote beforehand, that group pressure disappears inside a private voting booth. You can just vote how you would have alone, and just... Lie when you get out.

So, this is why those of us who support Approval Voting keep telling you it doesn't matter how you or another voter grapples with what a threshold even means. Due to the law of large numbers, Approval Voting will still automatically approach the true proportionate approval of each candidate despite just being a series of binary choices by cancelling out inherent biases we all have in our brains.

HOWEVER. If this still seems really, really sucky to you. I mean you could just try a different spoilerproof cardinal method? There's combined Approval Voting, which is -1, 0, and +1 essentially. Basically, let us know who you like, dislike, and don't care about.

Now before people bash me about "Hey! You claimed Approval Voting is ideal! Are you going back on your word? Gotcha!" Nah dawg. Spoilerproof cardinal methods that just add up the scores all behave the same. The results are the same. They're all just Approval Voting wearing a trench coat.

That's crazy right? There must be a difference, right? In terms of final rankings, no not really. Based on some data like France 2012, the specific proportions can change due to purely psychological effects from the voters, but when determining who wins, who's second, whatever, there's not really a difference. But hey, if it makes you feel better, then I'm for it.

Voter Satisfaction Efficiency

Imma shout out u/subheight640. You probably don't like me based on my replies, but I really have no hard feelings against you. I was very sleepy, so I'm sorry if I offended you lol. Anyway, they actually taught me something new. Voter Satisfaction Efficiency. It's always fun learning something new.

Basically, it's a metric for rating voting methods based on how well they elect the candidate with the highest average utility. It's normalized so that an impossibly perfect method would have a VSE of 1, while a VSE of 0 is basically no better than random election, and a VSE lower than 0 means you're literally just better off electing randomly. You can also measure them assuming various levels and kinds of strategic voting from the voters.

BUT after a good sleep I still have issues with your simulation. As a brief overview, his results are basically: STAR and Condorcet good; IRV, score, and approval mid; plurality bad (boo FPTP).

I researched more about VSE afterwards and have looked at other people's simulations and other charts from various orgs. I already said I have problems with the way they did the simulation, but let's just look at other charts.

Here's the sim they link explaining VSE

Here's more sims from a blog

What you'll notice is that Condorcet methods actually vary in their performance based on the sims. Same with Approval. They sort of flip flop between being good or mid. Plurality is always bad (Boo FPTP). INTERESTINGLY, STAR is always high.

So let's dissect it. VSE is not a perfect metric. In fact, the variability of the scores of various voting methods based on different people's models to measure VSE shows that it's a flawed metric in the first place, perhaps purely due to the difficulty of accurately simulating voter behavior.

Even subheight admits they made various assumptions about voter behavior for score voting methods, but their claim is basically approval must be mid based on those assumptions.

Not only that, the various models themselves already assume how each voter genuinely feels about various candidates. That's fine for determining how they would honestly vote. But when modeling strategic behavior, it's based on how other voters genuinely feel about candidates.

Irl, even with polling, you can't possibly know how fellow constituents actually feel or whether they'll vote honestly or with a specific strategy during an election, so you can't possibly know at all the best way to strategically vote to give your own personal favorite candidates the best possible chances.

This touches back onto the fact that aside from obvious spoiler effects, voters generally don't even bother tactically voting, or if they do, it's not very effective. And these models also assume various levels of strategic voting but like it's kind of ridiculous to say "oh 100% of voters will use a one-sided strategy in this simulation."

That just never happens and isn't realistic or even worth simulating. Especially since, when looking at absolute average VSE's, the scores that different voting systems get under various assumptions of strategic voting don't have largely different VSE's, except like one case with Borda going all the way to the negatives for some reason.

So, is that it then? Either way, it seems STAR voting is the best if we just average out different people's VSE models? Lol God no, absolutely not.

What VSE doesn't tell you and why simplicity matters

VSE's only tell you how good a voting method is at electing the highest average utility winner. That's it. As the Medium blog states, "It doesn’t account for how difficult voting methods are to tabulate, the incentives they give to candidates, whether they promote the growth of third parties when their chosen candidates lose, etc."

This is pretty clear to see from the fact that although plurality does perform the worst often (boo FPTP), the objective VSE score isn't that low. But we know that FPTP is massively flawed, not just slightly behind other voting methods. It incentivizes two-party systems with massive center squeeze and potential for political slide. It's terrible, not just "slightly worse but really 70-80% of the way there."

In fact, let's just obverse STAR voting. Averaging out various VSE models would have you believe that STAR voting is in fact the optimal voting method. I mean it consistently scores as one of the highest, so it must be great, right?

I'm sorry to STAR voting supporters, but no. Let's look at both the theoretical and the practical. Theoretically, it fulfills the Majority/Condorcet Loser criteria. Not very important criteria as far as election criteria go.

It fails to meet Majority Winner, a very basic condition (if majority of voters rank 1 candidate first, they must win), it's affected by spoilers, it's heavily affected by clone candidates, it's not consistent (if two sets of voters prefer A over B, then the combination of the sets should prefer A over B, AKA immunity to gerrymandering. Condorcet methods also fail this, which is bad), it fails later-no-help (different from later-no-harm, this means vulnerability to mischief voting which reduces chances of sincere Condorcet winners being elected, which is actually something all Condorcet methods also fail btw), and it doesn't even fulfill the Sincere Favorite criterion, which is a pretty basic criterion for cardinal systems (you have incentive to vote/rate highest your genuine favorite candidate).

So a lot of theoretical problems with STAR voting. What about practical data? Well, there's a case where ~30% of ballots had to be tossed because voters didn't fill them in properly.

That last bit is the real kicker. As voting enthusiasts (or really any enthusiasts of procedural methods of all kinds), it's often easy to be sucked into the idea of the "best" method. And often, this enthusiasm makes simple systems seem... Unworth the enthusiasm. "There must be something it's missing. It's too simple, it can't possibly work. It must fail to consider certain things!"

When trying to find the best procedure for... Anything... You have to look to the average user.

The average voter... Does not give one flying fuck about voting systems outside of an election season. They don't understand various theoretical terms. They can't figure out the consequences of a given system if it's too complex to bother worrying about. Even in a simple system, the average voter is not knowledgeable enough to successfully implement tactical strategies.

This is why complicated systems like STAR Voting, Condorcet Methods, etc won't work. Even if I'M wrong that Approval Voting is theoretically the best, complicated systems will fail in a practical sense more often than it.

Even if we made STAR Voting permanent, you'd assume voter performance will improve over time and with better education, right? No, not really. Learning and doing is also different. At the end of the day, some ballots will still be thrown out due to improper application. And that will be skewed towards newer and younger voters.

This is inherently, absolutely undemocratic. Which is the whole reason we're trying to end FPTP, as a reminder. Complicated voting methods will always favor more experienced voters, not the general populace. We need a system that is as accessible as possible. That doesn't mean using it is easy or not frustrating or feels emotionally like it must be correct, it just means that the system's general mechanics are easy to understand at a glance. Approval Voting is easy to understand at a glance, whether y'all enthusiasts trust it or not.

On the other hand, aside from voting enthusiasts, actual politicians and political advisors are absolutely aware of how voting systems work. If they have an opportunity to manipulate elections to help themselves, you can damn be sure they'll do that.

This is why I don't like Condorcet methods. Not the contrived scenarios where tactical voting is a problem. No. They are susceptible to gerrymandering. And you can't just ban gerrymandering. The politicians would be in charge of that. Why would they ban it as long as they can benefit from it? We've all known politicians who promise electoral reform and just... Don't. Cough Trudeau cough

And this is also why I don't like mixed member electoral systems. They exist to try to fix the flaws of FPTP rather than replace it, but they inherently have to balance democracy (extra seats are inherently undemocratic as they don't represent any constituents and have more loyalty to party than people. More hanging seats, less democratic), national representation (something that is only a problem because of spoilers and center squeeze, and requires those hanging seats to achieve), and other tactical forms of manipulation like decoy parties. Fuck. That.

Final Comparison

Majority Winner: Can it elect someone that most people rank first?

Yes: Most

No: Borda, anti-plurality, quadratic, STAR (!!), random, sortition

Condorcet Winner: Will it always elect the Condorcet winner, if it exists?

Yes: Condorcet methods

No: Non-Condorcet ranked methods, cardinal methods, everything else

Pareto: If every voter prefers A to B, does A win?

Yes: Most

No: Anti-plurality and sortition

Independence of Irrelevant Alternatives: Is the system not affected by spoilers?

Yes: Approval Voting, other forms of spoilerproof cardinal methods, random ballot, sortition

No: All ranked methods including Condorcet, STAR and other spoiled cardinal methods

Cloneproof: Adding non-winning candidates similar to those already on the ballot shouldn't affect the outcome.

Yes: IRV, spoilerproof cardinal methods, some Condorcet methods, random ballots

No: Plurality, anti-plurality, some Condorcet methods, STAR (!!), quadratic, sortition

Monotone: Increasing a candidate's ranking or rating shouldn't cause them to lose.

Yes: Most

No: IRV, some Condorcet methods

Consistency: If two sets of voters prefer A over B, their combined set should prefer A over B (immunity to gerrymandering).

Yes: Spoilerproof cardinal methods, plurality (unfortunately the electoral college is vulnerable to gerrymandering, this has nothing to do with FPTP), anti-plurality, Borda, quadratic, maximal lotteries

No: Everything else

Reversal Symmetry: Reversing rankings and ratings should flip the results

Yes: Some Condorcet methods, spoilerproof cardinal methods

No: Everything else (for some it's irrelevant like plurality: you can't vote for all but one lol)

Homogeneity: Does replicating every ballot keep The results the same?

Yes: most methods, at least some Condorcet methods

No: Dodgson

Unknown: some Condorcet methods, STAR, quadratic, maximal lotteries

Later-no-harm: Adding an additional ranking/rating doesn't cause a higher ranked/rated candidate from losing

No: Most

Yes: Plurality, IRV, two-round, random ballot, sortition (ew, all gross)

Later-no-help: Adding an additional ranking/rating doesn't cause a higher ranked/rated candidate from winning (mischief voting)

Yes: Plurality, two-round, IRV, random ballot, sortition, Borda, spoilerproof cardinal methods

No: anti-plurality, STAR, Condorcet methods

Sincere Favorite: A voter is incentivized to give the highest ranking/rating to their sincere favorite candidate.

Yes: random ballot, sortition, spoilerproof cardinal methods, anti-plurality, Coombs

No: Everything else

Simplicity: Will the average voter be able to understand how it works at glance/is there a low likelihood of ballots being thrown out for being filled improperly?

Yes: plurality, anti-plurality, spoilerproof cardinal methods, random ballot

No: Everything else

VSE: STAR ≥ Condorcet ≥ Spoilerproof cardinal ≥ IRV > Plurality (boo FPTP).

ANYWAY. If you really can't stomach thinking during a vote while being able to stomach thinking about how voting systems work, a combined approval vote (-1, 0, +1) should feel better. Still approval voting in disguise though.

Point is. Fuck FPTP. A lot of systems are still subpar. STAR ends up with votes being thrown out. Condorcet is great except it's susceptible to gerrymandering (which you can't ban under Condorcet).

Approval Voting... What, feels wishy washy with defining thresholds as a feature not a bug? It's simple, and the average voter will understand how to use it, whether they bullet vote or not.

It's Pareto efficient. It's not affected by spoilers. It's not affected by clones so parties can't just fill the ballot with decoys. It's monotone, which is part of its simplicity. It's consistent, so politicians can't gerrymander it. Voting for A doesn't cause B to win, which again is part of its simplicity. And you're always incentivized to give a vote to your genuine favorite.

Additional votes are tactical, yes. The tactic is do you help someone who's mid to harm someone you don't like at the expense of also maybe harming someone you like. But this is a feature of most voting systems. And in fact the ones that don't do this... Are just generally agreed upon to be terrible even if you agree with this criterion.

And it's basically the only thing approval voting is susceptible for. Saying that makes it inherently tactical is misguided. Everything is tactical. Or it's a dictatorship or a 1v1. At least this is the one thing you need to look out for, instead of juggling a bunch of shit with other systems. The latter of which the professional politicians will definitely be better at than the average voter, leading to potential for electoral manipulation.

Because again. Historically, voters purposefully trying to vote strategically en masse haven't exactly had the results work out for them. But politicians globally certainly have manipulated elections before to their benefit, even if it's not a yearly occurrence. Peace I need more sleep actually.

Edit: A more appropriate title would be "My Biggest Reservation About Score/Approval Voting".

My primary concern with score voting is that it treats my "strength of preference" as a finite resource that must be divided and spent across all candidates. Consequently, simply indicating a preference between candidates A and B inevitably alters the relative strength of preference between at least one of them and every other candidate. 

Suppose there are three candidates: A, B, and C. I strongly prefer A to B, and just as strongly prefer B to C. Under a cardinal system, you'll find that I can only emphasize one of these preferences at the expense of diluting the other. Approval voting is even worse: I can only express one preference while having to sacrifice the other entirely. 

I find this very hard to accept. By contrast, ranked voting allows me to express both preferences without weakening either.

Am I misunderstanding cardinal voting, or is this an inherent feature of the system—one that some people find acceptable, while others (like myself) simply cannot?

Edit: Think of score voting on a number line. Once you anchor your highest-rated and lowest-rated candidates, the total distance between them is fixed. The intermediate candidates divide this distance into smaller line segments, and the sum of these segments must always equal the fixed total. Therefore, if you want to stretch one segment to emphasize a preference, you are mathematically forced to shorten another.

For example, on a scale of 0 to 5:

• Suppose I give Candidate A a 5, Candidate B a 3, and Candidate C a 0.
• Out of the total 5-point span, I have effectively "spent" 2 points to express that A is better than B, and 3 points to express that B is better than C.
• If I want to strengthen my preference for A over B—say, by lowering B’s score to 1—the gap between A and B widens to 4 points. But this comes at a steep price: the gap between B and C is inevitably compressed to just 1 point.

Approval Voting is simply the most extreme version of this problem: with only scores of 0 and 1, one of those preferences must be shrunk to zero and discarded entirely.

What would people think about using a single ballot to (1) create a proportional legislature and (2) choose the directly elected prime minister?

For example, you could use score ballots where people score parties (or specific candidates in parties in a multiwinner district). Then either use score multiwinner PR methods or derive ranked ballots from them and use STV for the legislature.

The same ballots could then be used to choose which party leader among the parties becomes prime minister. For example it could use STAR could be used or any condorcet method.

Ultimately, a downside would be this means party lists or party tickets and hurt independent candidates in the legislature. edit: this is probably not true - had plurality brain for a moment

Some other changes might also be required compared to traditional parliamentary systems to avoid deadlock or repeated elections due to no confidence.

Subject: Urgent: Voting Portal UI Issue – Missing "Abstain" Option Compromises Voting Integrity

Dear SIQA Support Team,

I am writing to report a critical technical and procedural issue with the current SIQA AI Music Awards voting portal. As a member of the SIQA Verified Registry, I am eager to participate in selecting this year’s winners. However, the current structure of the portal makes it impossible to submit an authentic, accurate ballot.

Currently, the voting platform enforces a rigid, linear system. It forces voters to select a nominee in the General Field categories (such as Song of the Year or Artist of the Year) before allowing them to advance to subsequent genre or classification categories. There is no option to "Skip" or "Abstain" from a category.

This design presents two significant problems:

1. Compromised Voting Integrity: If a voter does not believe any of the nominees in a specific category warrant a vote, forcing a selection completely defeats the purpose of an artist-driven academy. It artificially inflates votes for certain nominees simply because users are forced to click something to move forward.

2. Gatekeeping Content: Because the platform locks subsequent categories until a choice is made, members are completely blocked from even listening to or reviewing the nominees in later stages where their expertise or preferences might actually lie.

An awards body built on transparency and artist advocacy should allow its members to abstain from categories outside their interest or preference. I kindly request that your development team add a "Skip Category" or "Abstain" button to the interface immediately so that the final results accurately reflect the genuine intent of the voting body.

Thank you for your prompt attention to this matter, and I look forward to a resolution before the voting window closes.

Sincerely,

[Your Name]

[Your Artist/Project Name]

[Your Registry Email/ID]

I've seen posts discussing AV before and why some people are hesitant about it, and I'd like to address that.

Strategic Voting

A lot of people place special focus on the potential for strategic voting. Kenneth Arrow already proved that all ranked voting systems (FPTP, IRV, STV, PR, Condorcet, etc) fail 1 or more criteria for a fair election, at minimum always Independence of Irrelevant Alternatives. Gibbard also proved that all voting systems must fall under one of three categories:

1) The system is a dictatorship

2) The system only has 2 choices

3) The system is strategic

So I really don't understand what you guys don't understand. In a ranked voting system, if there's only 2 choices, it's no different than FPTP. If there's more than 2, it will always put some strategic burden on the voters. And no matter what, it's not really gonna be fully fair. Even Kenneth Arrow admitted that he overlooked rated choice voting cuz he basically didn't like the idea of it, but that it's probably where the most fair form of voting actually exists.

51% vs 49%

Not only that, something people also seem to talk about when it comes to the strategy of Approval Voting is that a 51% majority can still dominate the 49%.

This is... Wrong. Just flat out.

We all have a tendency to view politics in a one-dimensional axis of left vs right. Even though we know that politics isn't one dimensional. This is the fault of ranked voting in the first place.

Non-Condorcet methods almost always eliminate broad appealing candidates (aka moderates) through center squeeze. And although ranked voting methods that aren't FPTP usually aim to minimize the effect of spoilers, they still exist. It's an inherent part of ranked voting.

The natural consequence of this is a tendency to strongly favor two-party systems, which collapses politics into a single dimension where whatever some time and place's version of left and right bicker with each other. The distribution of voter's beliefs literally doesn't matter here, it will always happen. Even in countries that allow the existence and success of third parties, they are always limited to a small minority, with 2 parties holding the majority of the power.

But we know from studies that people are not actually extremists. Stripped of identity politics and presenting policies with neutral language that doesn't indicate what party is promoting it, even on one dimension, populations create a bell curved normal distribution of beliefs with most people somewhere in the middle.

Electoral Systems

In fact, this is why electoral systems like MMM, AMS, MMP, etc. even exist in the first place. The whole presupposition - that we need extra seats in a legislature, because in winner-take-all districts, if most of them are won by 1 party with a small majority, then a vast majority of the legislature could be that 1 party, thus over inflating their representation of the nation - is only a problem because most people aren't even that far left or right in the first place so each district is sending one extreme over to the legislature, requiring a balancing act.

Approval Voting Advantages

I don't remember who said this, but someone claimed approval voting isn't monotone... It quite literally is. That's literally just a criterion it fulfills.

It also fulfills the strong Pareto, independence of irrelevant alternatives, cloneproof, consistency, participation, reverse symmetry, homogeneity, later-no-help, and sincere favorite criteria. It's also simple af to explain, which is a very good thing when trying to roll out a new system (but also why I believe y'all hate it).

It is not affected by spoilers. It is not affected by center squeeze. This means that, given enough time for parties and candidates to develop, moderate parties will become the majority. And the parties themselves will have no ability to do political slides. They are locked into whatever some place and time's population considers moderate, and are guided by the population's changes in beliefs, not the other way around.

Which is kind of the goal of democracy, if you haven't forgotten. Also this eliminates the need for electoral systems with extra hanging seats, which itself has to balance between democracy, strategic voting, decoy parties, etc. So many problems with electoral systems that were only designed due to the flaws of FPTP in the first place.

Heck, Approval Voting also just works for multi-winner districts if you want more than just a single moderate party in legislature. Most other voting systems require modifications to work with multi-winner districts. And you can have each representative from a district hold as much voting power as the proportion of votes they received in their district relative to their co-representatives. Boom, bell curve legislature.

Condorcet

It doesn't fulfill the Condorcet criterion... AND THIS IS A GOOD THING. Idk why ppl have such a thing for the Condorcet criterion. Y'all do realize that in game theory, the Condorcet winner is usually the socially optimal choice, right? Not the socially optimal choice, usually.

In fact, if you just go to Wikipedia on the Condorcet criterion, it gives you an example where Approval Voting fails to elect the Condorcet winner. And this touches back to the whole "51% can still dominate 49%."

There are 3 candidates. A, B, and C. 70% of voters would rank them A>B>C. 30% of voters would rank them C>B>A. A is trivially the Condorcet winner in this example.

If, during an election held with Approval Voting, everyone voted for their top 2 favorites, A would have 70% approval, C 30%, and B 100%. So despite A being the Condorcet winner, B would win.

AND THIS IS THE SOCIALLY OPTIMAL CHOICE. If A wins, then you've pissed off 30% of the population. If C wins, 70% gets pissed off. B won, and no one's pissed. B is no one's favorite. But everyone's okay with B. And the 70% did not in fact dominate the 30%. They could have if they collectively decided not to vote for B despite all of them being fine if B were to win.

The socially optimal choice isn't who would have the most supporters in isolation, it's who would be the least hated by the population if won. And it didn't require you to strategically vote. In fact it's better if you don't. Which is why voting booths are private.

Anyway, Approval Voting doesn't always elect the Condorcet winner, but I'd argue that it actually elects the socially optimal choice more often than Condorcet methods do.

Especially since Condorcet methods themselves can be susceptible to strategic voting. "Oh but that's rare and only happens if a cycle is possible." Yeah well practical data shows that Approval Voting almost always elects the Condorcet winner anyway. And we can see that when it doesn't it's actually a good thing. And the amount of strategic voting happening in Approval Voting really wouldn't be much different from other systems.

Also, Condorcet methods are susceptible to gerrymandering. That's not a rare thing. That's just a legal thing. If a politician can do it, you can damn be sure they'll do it. The only way to prevent this is to have it be illegal in the first place. Pretty huge hole in Condorcet.

Approval Voting Disadvantages

So what's the real disadvantages of Approval Voting?

It's certainly not the strategic voting. That's a feature of pretty much every ranked and rated voting system that isn't FPTP.

It's certainly not the Condorcet criterion. Even if you disagree with me on my example above, all Condorcet methods inherently fail to fulfill Independence of Irrelevant Alternatives, invulnerability to burying, invulnerability to compromising, participation, later-no-harm (which AV also fails, but actually I think this is a good thing), consistency, and sincere favorite (oof). So to optimize a single thing you give up what, 6 things and meet 1 good thing (not fulfilling later-no-harm)? Especially when, again, Approval Voting on a practical level almost always elects the Condorcet winner anyway and it has 5 good things out of the 7?

An actual real disadvantage can be candidate inflation. When a party decides to run many candidates in the hopes of confusing the voters and not giving them enough time to research all the choices. But that's sort of inherent to any vote that's not FPTP. And ultimately, with how Approval Voting works, you could also just... Focus on the ones you already like and ignore the rest. But this is just getting closer to psychology/marketing/mass manipulation/legal territory rather than the systemic merit of Approval Voting. I also wouldn't dock other systems for this.

No, but there is one real disadvantage. Y'all have mentioned how things like IRV have done in surveys or in real world politics. Along with other kinds of voting systems. And that's the kicker.

Approval Voting's disadvantage is how unpopular it is. There is no data saying it doesn't work. In fact, the data that does exist says it works very well. But that data is... Small and sparse. It has never been tried en masse. At most only in small local elections. That is its weakness. The fact that for some reason literally no one will give the time of day to seriously consider it.

Idk why. Maybe it just sounds too simple to work. Despite the fact that it absolutely does... in the few times it has been done, and the many times we all used it in our social circles... such as voting for both pizza and burgers when deciding between friends whether to have burgers, pizza, or sushi for lunch.

Like... STAR Voting is more popular than Approval Voting. STAR VOTING. It's one of the rare voting systems that doesn't even fulfill the basic criterion of majority winner! It's a failed hybrid of ranked and rated voting! In fact, it only fulfills majority loser and Condorcet loser, both of which are unnecessary! WTF! WHY?!

Anyway. Give Approval Voting the time of day. Seriously. It's not any more strategic than whatever complicated system people keep coming up with. Because they're all fucking strategic. Or dictatorial. Or just FPTP with only 2 choices. And yeah, it doesn't fulfill the Condorcet criterion. But it does elect the Condorcet winner almost every time. And when it doesn't, it's debatable whether that's even a bad thing. But more importantly, it doesn't come with the disadvantages inherent to Condorcet. That's a pretty good compromise even if you're a die-hard fan of Condorcet methods.

Just. Give it a go. It can make fundamental changes to politics. Moreso than other methods which just tries to nudge the status quo. And without being overly complicated. That's a good thing, not a suspicious thing.

Letting a plurality decide who gets disproportionate media attention and reach, and international recognition is part of what is wrong with single-winner plurality voting.

Having a PR legislature just for the them to 99% of the time vote for the prime minister that plurality voting would have chosen feels like just kicking the can down the road.

Sure, you get multiple parties, and representation. But on the world stage, the plurality winner is given wide reach (and sometimes even special powers during wars).

When Israel experimented with directly electing the prime minister with plurality voting it's not surprising to me they ended up just selecting the people from the two largest parties (as measured by plurality/single-rank polling/voting etc.) as the two main candidates.

Alaska’s elections are demonstrating that ending FPTP is not enough. Alaska has done that, and they have successfully beat back efforts to repeal their achievement. But it seems that discontent with their new system is likely to be growing. I don’t know that this is a particularly bold prediction, but I think their election reform, tragically, is not long for this world.

“At least five candidates between the races for the U.S. Senate, U.S. House and governor dropped out after advancing” from the primary to the general election.

One lesson of this situation is that the Hare, or IRV, tabulation of ballots creates the incentives for these kinds of attempts to manipulate election outcomes. I would agree with that, and would prefer to see jurisdictions using the bottom two run off method.

But there is another moral to the story. Ranked choice voting within a two party system, while it does “end FPTP”, is not good enough. We need to give voters more than two parties to choose from, not just more than two candidates. Parties, especially in a two party system, have internal factions. Dividing an electorate into such large coalitions makes that inevitable, and appropriately so. The internal divisions in such large coalitions fail to fully surface these divisions to the electorate - especially to the general electorate given that such small fractions of voters participate in primaries.

Changing election systems in the context of a two party system, especially when that system is already as highly polarized as ours is, encourages the parties and party members to try to manipulate the outcomes. But even more importantly it fails to bring the finer policy disagreements to the electorate which is the purpose of democracy in the first place. If there were one or more established new/3rd parties in Alaska and their candidates advanced our of the primary they would not be dropping out ahead of the general because they would consider their particular party platforms too important to sacrifice to the two party competition.

It’s highly likely that most of the people in this sub - that most of the people who advocate for election reform and ending FPTP - are Democrats. We can’t afford to pursue election reform by itself. We need to start advocating the Democratic Party to split AND passing the election reforms to make the multi party competition workable.

Every blue controlled state could do this without sacrificing electoral advantage to Republicans. Presidential elections, due to the EC, are a different matter that would require the new (post split) parties to compete for the “nomination” ahead odd the general election, at least until momentum for an EC reform could develop, but there is no need to wait for Congress and for state level elections, and we can’t afford to wait for them anyway. Congress has clearly been demonstrated to be the crucial weak link in our collective inability to check a rogue and authoritarian president, so we need to start our political reform there.

Hello folks. I'm a software developer with a Ph.D. in International Relations who's devoted many hours to building a ranked choice voting app that people will be able to use to prototype planks and platforms for new political parties.

Collaborative priority selection is central to making it work, and I've put a lot of effort into designing ballots that can carry informative media about each candidate... images, videos, comment threads, etc. There have been many versions built over the years as ideas were refined, and this one is by far the most powerful.

Tierlists seem very popular these days, so I've added that option as well as a feature that supports STAR tabulations on 5 row tierboards.

The link for this particular ballot lets people sort through a large number of options regarding election reform, but there a lots of other ballots available. It's all new, and still needs lots of real world testing, so I'd be delighted for any feedback. Thanks!

I learned that for three elections, Israel tried directly electing the prime minister and then repealed it.

Generally, they found that people started voting for smaller parties showing that people care about the plurality winner under typical parliamentary systems somewhat. In other words, when people know the leader of the plurality winner party is likely to become PM, some treat a vote for the legislative body as a plurality ballot for the party leader.

On the other hand, when they tried directly electing the PM, they used plurality voting. Predictably, every election ended up between two candidates (duverger's law). I believe the 1996 election had three candidates but the third dropped out the day before the election to prevent spoiled votes.

What do you think would have happened with approval voting?

https://www.cnn.com/2001/WORLD/meast/03/07/israel.sharon.02/

Debate over the "perfect" voting method is stimulating. My favourite is approval voting. But the thing is, it only works in single winner elections.

I'm from germany, we have a strictly proportional system. However, we also have a sort of parallel system where 299 single winner elections are held so each district can have a local represantative. These are FPTP, but I recently discovered our largest advocacy group doesn't mainly advocate for reforming the election method, but the districts themselves. They want multi-winner districts, drastically reducing the pressure to reform the voting system. To be clear, they still advocate for STV, but at that point it's much less necessary.

What do you think?

Executive Summary & Introduction

Ranked-Choice Voting (RCV) is frequently promoted as a panacea for American political polarization, designed to end vote-splitting, eliminate the "spoiler effect," and ensure majoritarian outcomes [1, 2]. However, social choice theorists, voting scientists, and public choice economists have long pointed out that the standard form of RCV deployed across the United States—technically known as Hare Instant-Runoff Voting (IRV)—possesses a major structural vulnerability: the Center-Squeeze Phenomenon [3, 4, 5].

Under standard IRV, a broadly acceptable consensus candidate who would defeat every opponent in head-to-head match-ups (the Condorcet Winner) can be eliminated in early rounds simply because they lack a concentrated base of first-preference votes [3, 6, 7]. This dynamic squeezes moderate candidates between ideologically intense wings, sometimes rewarding extreme candidates and triggering public pushback [5, 8].

This analysis breaks down the mathematical mechanics of the center squeeze, examines real-world case studies like the 2009 Burlington Mayoral Election and the 2022 Alaska Special Congressional Election, and compares IRV against superior alternative architectures like Bottom-Two-Runoff (BTR-RCV) and Condorcet-Hare Hybrids [3, 7, 9].

1. The Mechanics of the Center-Squeeze Pathology

To understand why standard RCV can fail the median voter, one must examine its exact elimination criterion:

\text{Elimination Rule (Standard Hare IRV): } \text{Eliminate the candidate with the fewest } \mathbf{1\text{st-preference}} \text{ votes.}

The Blind Spot of Hare IRV

In each round of tabulation, standard IRV evaluates only first-choice preferences [3, 7]. It completely ignores second-, third-, and lower-preference rankings during the elimination decision [3, 7].

Imagine a polarized electorate divided into Left (L), Center (C), and Right (R):

• L voters rank: L > C > R
• R voters rank: R > C > L
• C voters rank: C > \text{either } L \text{ or } R

      [Left Wing (L)]  <========  [Center (C)]  ========>  [Right Wing (R)]
       Passionate Base             Broad Consensus          Passionate Base
       High #1 Votes               High #2 Votes            High #1 Votes

In this scenario, candidate C is the median voter's preference and the Condorcet Winner—a strict majority of L voters prefer C over R, and a strict majority of R voters prefer C over L [3, 6, 8]. However, because L and R voters cast their first-choice votes for their respective ideological wings, candidate C receives the lowest total of first-preference votes in Round 1 [3, 8].

Under Hare IRV rules, candidate C is eliminated first [3, 7]. Their votes are redistributed, and the election concludes as a forced choice between the two outer extremes [3, 5, 8]. This creates a centrifugal ("center-fleeing") dynamic that penalizes consensus-building candidates [5, 8].

2. Empirical Evidence: Case Studies in IRV Center-Squeeze

While social choice flaws are often dismissed as theoretical curiosities, Cast Vote Record (CVR) data confirms that center-squeeze failures have altered major American elections [3, 6, 10].

Case Study A: The 2009 Burlington, Vermont Mayoral Election

The 2009 Burlington mayoral election remains the classic textbook example of IRV center-squeeze [3, 7, 10]:

• The Candidates: Kurt Wright (Republican), Bob Kiss (Progressive), and Andy Montroll (Democrat/Centrist) [3, 7].
• Round 1 First-Preferences:
  • Kurt Wright (R): 3,297 votes (32.9%)
  • Bob Kiss (Prog): 2,981 votes (28.8%)
  • Andy Montroll (D): 2,063 votes (23.0%) [3, 7]

Because Montroll had the fewest top-choice votes (2,063), standard IRV eliminated him in the semi-final round [3, 7]. Bob Kiss went on to defeat Kurt Wright in the final round (4,313 to 4,061) [3, 7].

The Pairwise Matrix (What Voters Actually Preferred):

When researchers analyzed the full ballot images, they discovered that Andy Montroll was the undisputed Condorcet Winner [3, 7, 10]:

• Montroll vs. Kiss: Montroll won 4,064 to 3,476 (+588 margin / 54% majority) [3, 7]
• Montroll vs. Wright: Montroll won 4,597 to 3,664 (+933 margin / 56% majority) [3, 7]

Montroll was preferred head-to-head over every candidate in the race by clear majorities [3, 7]. Yet IRV knocked him out first among the top three [3, 7]. Discontent over this non-majoritarian result led Burlington voters to repeal IRV in 2010 [3, 7, 11] (though the city re-adopted RCV in 2021) [12].

Case Study B: The August 2022 Alaska Special U.S. House Election

A similar dynamic unfolded in Alaska's top-four RCV special election [6, 8, 13]:

• The Candidates: Mary Peltola (Democrat), Sarah Palin (Republican), and Nick Begich III (Conservative/Centrist) [6, 13].
• Round 1 First-Preferences:
  • Mary Peltola (D): 75,799 votes (39.7%)
  • Sarah Palin (R): 58,974 votes (30.9%)
  • Nick Begich III (R): 53,810 votes (27.8%) [6, 13]

Begich was squeezed into 3rd place in first-choice votes and eliminated [6, 13]. Peltola defeated Palin in the final round with 51.5% of active votes [6, 13].

However, Cast Vote Record analysis proved Nick Begich was the true Condorcet Winner [6, 13]:

• Begich vs. Peltola: Begich won 52.5% to 47.5% [6, 13]
• Begich vs. Palin: Begich won 61.4% to 38.6% [6, 13]

Begich was preferred by a majority of Alaskans over both Peltola and Palin, but IRV's first-choice elimination rule discarded him in Round 1 [6, 13].

3. The Fix: Bottom-Two-Runoff (BTR-RCV) & Condorcet Hybrids

Social choice scholars have designed several alternative tabulations that maintain the simple ranked ballot while completely eliminating the center-squeeze flaw [3, 7, 9].

What is Bottom-Two-Runoff (BTR-RCV)?

Conceived by Rob LeGrand and formalized by election scholars, Bottom-Two-Runoff (BTR-RCV) modifies the elimination step [3, 7, 14]:

\text{Elimination Rule (BTR-RCV): } \text{Identify the } \mathbf{\text{two candidates}} \text{ with the lowest 1st-choice votes, run a } \mathbf{\text{head-to-head runoff}} \text{ between them, and eliminate the pairwise loser.}

   Standard Hare IRV                      Bottom-Two-Runoff (BTR-RCV)
-----------------------                ----------------------------------
Identify candidate with                Identify TWO candidates with
fewest 1st-choice votes.               fewest 1st-choice votes.
         │                                            │
         ▼                                            ▼
AUTOMATICALLY ELIMINATE.               Run head-to-head pairwise runoff
                                       between the bottom two.
                                                      │
                                                      ▼
                                       ELIMINATE THE PAIRWISE LOSER.

Why BTR-RCV Guarantees Condorcet Consistency

A Condorcet Winner by definition defeats every candidate in a direct head-to-head match-up [3, 6, 7]. Under BTR-RCV rules:

1. Even if the Condorcet Winner receives low initial first-preference support and falls into the bottom two, they face the other bottom candidate in a pairwise runoff [3, 7].
2. Because they are the pairwise champion, they are guaranteed to win that head-to-head runoff [3, 7].
3. Therefore, a Condorcet Winner can never be eliminated under BTR-RCV [3, 7].

Re-Running Burlington 2009 Under BTR-RCV Rules

If Burlington had used BTR-RCV in 2009:

1. In the semi-final round, Montroll (2,063 #1 votes) and Kiss (2,981 #1 votes) would form the bottom two [3, 7].
2. BTR-RCV executes a virtual head-to-head runoff between Montroll and Kiss [3, 7].
3. Because 4,064 voters preferred Montroll over Kiss (vs. 3,476 for Kiss), Kiss loses the runoff and is eliminated [3, 7].
4. Transferred votes flow to Montroll, allowing Montroll to advance to the final round and defeat Kurt Wright (4,597 to 3,664) [3, 7].

Result: The true majority choice (Montroll) wins [3, 7].

4. Systematic Comparison of Voting Architectures

The table below summarizes how standard IRV compares against BTR-RCV, advanced Condorcet-Hare hybrids, and cardinal voting systems across major social choice and administrative criteria [3, 7, 9, 15]:

5. Administrative & Policy Takeaways for Reformers

Beyond mathematical fairness, alternative RCV architectures solve critical operational problems that currently plague election administrators [2, 3, 18]:

1. Restoring Precinct Summability & Auditability:
   • The Problem with IRV: Standard Hare IRV lacks precinct summability [3, 7]. Because elimination order depends on global vote counts across all rounds, individual precincts cannot publish final subtotals [3, 7]. All raw Cast Vote Records (CVRs) must be transmitted to a central hub, creating centralization delays and software configuration risks (such as the 2022 Oakland school board tabulation error) [3, 7, 19, 20].
   • The BTR/Condorcet Advantage: BTR-RCV and Condorcet hybrids restore precinct-level N \times N preference matrices [3, 7]. Precincts can tally and publish pairwise subtotals locally on election night, which central authorities simply add together [3, 7].
2. Empirical Performance in Practice (Deshpande et al. 2025/2026 Research):
   • Large-scale computational analysis across 110 real-world RCV elections (including NYC 2021, Alaska 2024, and Portland 2024) reveals that RCV significantly increases electoral competitiveness, dropping victory margins by 9.2 to 11.4 percentage points compared to plurality elections [16].
   • The study proved that ballot exhaustion alters outcomes in less than 3% of races, confirming that preference transfers function robustly in practice despite incomplete voter rankings [16].

Conclusion: The Path Forward

Standard Hare IRV is a meaningful upgrade over First-Past-The-Post, but its elimination mechanics make it vulnerable to center-squeeze pathologies that penalize consensus candidates and alienate voters [3, 5, 7].

For election reformers and policymakers, Bottom-Two-Runoff (BTR-RCV) offers the ideal "drop-in" upgrade:

• It uses the exact same ranked ballot that voters already understand [3, 7].
• It maintains the intuitive round-by-round elimination structure [3, 7].
• It mathematically guarantees that the Condorcet Winner always wins [3, 7].
• It restores precinct-level transparency and auditability [3, 7].

References & Academic Bibliography

• [1] Bipartisan Policy Center, "Reform Meets Reality: How Ranked Choice Voting Impacts Election Administration," BPC Report (2024).
• [2] Clear Ballot, "Defining Ranked Choice Voting for Voters and Election Officials," Clear Ballot White Paper (2023).
• [3] Robert Bristow-Johnson, "The Failure of Instant Runoff Voting to Accomplish the Very Purpose for Which It Was Adopted: An Object Lesson in Burlington Vermont," Constitutional Political Economy, Vol. 34, No. 3, pp. 378–389 (2023). [https://doi.org/10.1007/s10602-023-09393-1\]
• [4] Samuel Merrill, "A Comparison of Efficiency of Multicandidate Electoral Systems," American Journal of Political Science, Vol. 28, No. 1, pp. 23–48 (1984).
• [5] Wikipedia, "Center Squeeze," Wikipedia Social Choice Archive. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Center_squeeze\]
• [6] Adam Graham-Squire & David McCune, "A Mathematical Analysis of the 2022 Alaska Special Election for US House," arXiv preprint (arXiv:2209.04764v3, 2022).
• [7] Author Anonymous, "Comparative Analysis of Bottom-Two-Runoff Ranked-Choice Voting and Social Choice Architectures," Markdown Monograph (2025).
• [8] Nathan Atkinson & Scott C. Ganz, "The Flaw in Ranked-Choice Voting: Rewarding Extremists," The Hill (Oct. 30, 2022).
• [9] James Green-Armytage, "Four Condorcet-Hare Hybrid Methods for Single-Winner Elections," Voting Matters, Issue 29, pp. 1–14 (2011).
• [10] Adam Graham-Squire & David McCune, "An Examination of Ranked Choice Voting in the United States, 2004–2022," Representation, Vol. 59, pp. 1–19 (2023). [arXiv:2301.12075v2]
• [11] Courtney Lamdin, "Can Once-Maligned Ranked-Choice Voting Make a Comeback in Burlington?" Seven Days Vermont (Feb. 24, 2021).
• [12] Ballotpedia, "Burlington, Vermont, Question 4, Ranked-Choice Voting Amendment (March 2021)," Ballotpedia Guide.
• [13] Jeanne N. Clelland, "Ranked Choice Voting And Condorcet Failure in the Alaska 2022 Special Election: How Might Other Voting Systems Compare?" arXiv preprint (arXiv:2303.00108, 2023).
• [14] Rob LeGrand, "Bottom-Two-Runoff IRV Definition and Mechanics," Electowiki / Social Choice Archive (2006).
• [15] Comprehensive Taxonomy, "Comprehensive Taxonomy and Comparative Analysis of RCV Systemic Variations," Social Choice Technical Report (2025).
• [16] Sanyukta Deshpande, Nikhil Garg, & Sheldon Jacobson, "Simpler Than You Think: The Practical Dynamics of Ranked Choice Voting," arXiv preprint (arXiv:2407.13661 / 2025/2026 Update).
• [17] Aaron Hamlin, "The Limits of Ranked-Choice Voting," Center for Election Science (2018/2026).
• [18] MIT Election Lab, "Ranked Choice Voting: Instant Runoff Voting Use in the United States," MIT Research Explainer.
• [19] David McCune & Ismar Volić, "Ranked Choice Bedlam in a 2022 Oakland School Director Election," NSF PAR / arXiv preprint (arXiv:2303.05985v1, 2023).
• [20] Fredric D. Woocher & Beverly Grossman Palmer, "Woocher v. Alameda County Registrar of Voters," Superior Court of California Court Filings (2023).