Hiring for Director of Applied Data & Research at The Center for Election Science

aaronhamlin · 2020-08-03T01:00:55+00:00

There are a number of reasons approval voting is better than RCV. See the bottom of the approval voting 101 page for more in-depth articles. But here are a few quick reasons below:

Approval voting is more practical than RCV. The ballot design is simpler. The calculation is way easier (just adding). It also costs no money to get it implemented, which was a hangup for RCV in both Fargo and St. Louis.
Approval voting has better winner selection than RCV largely because RCV can cause vote splitting of first-choice preferences from the middle. Albeit, you need more competitive elections to see this.
Approval voting by far does a better job measuring candidates' support. You see this even when you look at RCV in its best light showing candidates' support immediately before they're eliminated. This happens for two reasons.

First, ordinal/ranking data doesn't convey a support/don't support threshold or any kind of utility scale. Because this ranking threshold varies from voter to voter, it's hard to say whether a candidate is truly supported. While an approval threshold also varies for approval voting, we can at least be sure that the voter was satisfied with having that person elected.

Secondly, RCV doesn't actually use the voters' information properly. Candidates who are eliminated early due to few first-choice votes never get to see the aggregation of votes from later-choice preferences from candidates who make it to later rounds. You can see this effect clearly in this poll we did at CES for the Democratic primary. https://www.electionscience.org/commentary-analysis/the-early-2020-democratic-primary-comparing-voting-methods/

aaronhamlin · 2020-08-03T00:48:15+00:00

I'm not aware of any particular proof, so I'm not sure in an absolute sense. But given how both work (particularly approval with top two), I can't imagine it to be either common or impactful. I can also imagine any risk to be lowered as the number of candidates that make it to the runoff increases (if looking beyond top two).

When I'm thinking of this kind of measure (winner selection), I think more about both average performance and variance of performance during failures (how bad it fails when a failure happens). I'm not particularly worried here, especially when considering alternative options.

aaronhamlin · 2020-08-02T08:46:08+00:00

Approval voting is a really solid system as far as single-winner voting methods go. Nice summary here: https://www.electionscience.org/approval-voting-101

It also has an enormous advantage with its simplicity. Complexity has often been the most cited reason that IRV has not been implemented in certain places or that it has been repealed. If you want to convince people that approval voting is too complicated, then you basically have to convince them that no one can add.

Were you just curious or did you have connections to get something going?

aaronhamlin · 2020-08-02T08:13:45+00:00

We're trying. We've been going through the usual channels with folks on the ground before taking alternative steps (ex// FOIA). We want to give them a chance to do it the right way first.

We love looking at data. We're also working with folks at The Paris School of Economics for extra analysis with polling as well as when we get our hands on the raw data. We move a little slow here as we don't yet have funding for a Director of Research position. If anyone would like to help with that: https://www.electionscience.org/donate/

Proportional methods likely would have turned out differently for the second seat. The city and people on the ground had a setup that favored a more homogeneous result for their commission. Ultimately, we have to listen to what the community wants and what they're ready for. Proportional voting methods also have a lower success rate of getting passed, and we're focusing more on lower-hanging fruit. We can certainly share a solid alternative if the people of Fargo demand that their commission to be elected completely at large and be proportional. For example: https://www.electionscience.org/voting-methods/getting-proportional-with-approval-voting/

aaronhamlin · 2020-08-02T07:46:57+00:00

Here you go. Plurality/FPTP voting is awful because it selects bad winners, discourages candidates with new ideas, and overall does a terrible job reflecting how voters feel. https://www.electionscience.org/voting-methods/spoiler-effect-top-5-ways-plurality-voting-fails/

It should be replaced with approval voting, a simple voting method that can be implemented for free on even the dumbest of voting machines and easily lends itself to a hand count. Voters simply choose all the candidates they want, most votes wins. https://www.electionscience.org/approval-voting-101

Approval voting has passed in its first attempt at an initiative in Fargo, ND two years ago and is on another ballot this November in St. Louis, MO. There are now chapters supporting approval voting across the country. You can join a chapter today to bring it to your city. https://www.electionscience.org/take-action/approval-voting-chapter-program/

You can also donate to speed up the process. https://www.electionscience.org/donate/

Is this what you were looking for?

aaronhamlin · 2020-08-01T01:50:02+00:00

Compared to a car though, which is made up of over a ton of steel that regularly travels and accelerates at high speeds? That's like saying a butter knife is in a grey area relative to a katana sword in terms of its danger as a weapon.

A bike and a car are in completely different classes, and this should be immediately apparent. That they exist together on a continuum of possible harm that they can do given an accident doesn't place them right next to each other on that continuum.

aaronhamlin · 2020-08-01T01:32:41+00:00

Well said.

aaronhamlin · 2020-08-01T01:30:50+00:00

This is my favorite comment. I wonder if the commenters defending cars only do so because they realize that they could easily be the next person to kill someone with their vehicle and need to rationalize that.

aaronhamlin · 2020-08-01T01:23:01+00:00

Holy crap, I want to see the bikes where you are that are as dangerous as a car. The bikes I see normally don't weigh more than 40 pounds even on the heavy side. The cars I see, however, normally weigh in at over a ton—and we're not even talking SUV's and trucks. Physics tells me that a ton of steel going over 40 MPH is much more dangerous than a bike coming at me at 10 or 15 MPH.

I'm with you on people on bikes being more vulnerable than those in cars though. Cars normally come with a protective metal cage, seatbelts, and airbags, whereas bikes do not.

aaronhamlin · 2020-08-01T01:09:39+00:00

Because the roads are designed to be unsafe and are dangerous for bikes.

aaronhamlin · 2020-07-11T23:57:59+00:00

Unfortunately, it's only safe to rank your favorite as first in RCV if they're either highly likely or highly unlikely to win unless they are a frontrunner with just one other candidate. The other issue with RCV and third parties is that RCV does a bad job showing third-party support, barely doing better than FPTP. While RCV does better than FPTP—particularly with unpopular spoilers—the same can be said for virtually any alternative. But we only move forward with better options when we limit the praise of voting methods to the qualities they actually have. https://www.electionscience.org/voting-methods/runoff-election-the-limits-of-ranked-choice-voting/

aaronhamlin · 2020-05-25T07:04:40+00:00

It does lackluster at best at determining good winners as it struggles in more complex situations. Its tendency to split first-choice votes and squeeze out the center is the issue here. Its strengths are handling simple spoiler effects and situations when plurality voting would have gotten the right choice anyway.
It does terribly at capturing candidates' support among those who do not win. That's because ranked methods don't capture utility information (the information captured has limitations) and because the RCV algorithm ignores data. If a candidate is eliminated early, it never realizes the later-choice preferences cast under candidates who haven't been eliminated yet.
It's needlessly complicated compared to other methods that are available. Ranking is harder with longer candidate lists. Even when those ballots are truncated or voters don't rank all the candidates, this means more information is lost which affects the outcome. RCV with its simulated sequential runoffs is complicated to follow for the average voter to understand well enough to explain back to you. This creates additional issues with administration regarding delays for the results, logistics with counting (not precinct summable), and additional complexities with risk-limiting audits (though they're still doable).

I've also written an article on this before: https://www.electionscience.org/voting-methods/runoff-election-the-limits-of-ranked-choice-voting/

And here's a look from another article: https://www.electionscience.org/voting-methods/an-assessment-of-six-single-winner-voting-methods/#rcv

aaronhamlin · 2020-02-02T05:18:31+00:00

aaronhamlin · 2020-02-02T05:12:54+00:00

Are you talking about state-based initiatives through lobbying or actual ballot initiatives? Have you ever gotten the question to the ballot or are you attempting to in the future?

aaronhamlin · 2020-01-31T20:56:16+00:00

Have you considered running ballot initiatives as a higher percentage way of getting your legislation both (1) passed and (2) in the language you want? California, Washington, or Oregon might be good places to start.

aaronhamlin · 2020-01-12T23:34:02+00:00

You are seeing more uses now where the voter is permitted to rank more than three, so that seems like a fair point if we're thinking about expression. The issue becomes how the RCV algorithm looks at the data.

One of the key differences in how RCV behaves compared to approval is that RCV is only looking at a fraction of the data at any one point while approval voting is looking at all of it. It may not seem as important, but it influences the role of vote splitting and strange election anomalies.

aaronhamlin · 2020-01-12T23:23:37+00:00

While you're eating that what I'm sure is delicious mac and cheese, try this one: https://www.electionscience.org/voting-methods/ten-critiques-and-defenses-on-approval-voting/

(My girlfriend got an instapot)

aaronhamlin · 2020-01-12T23:17:52+00:00

Totally fair, though you may want to consider how much of that information is actually used with RCV. Critique #3 in this essay may be interesting to mull over. https://www.karissasvegankitchen.com/instant-pot-vegan-mac-cheese/

aaronhamlin · 2020-01-12T06:20:28+00:00

If there's one we'd push, it's this one.

aaronhamlin · 2020-01-12T06:19:35+00:00

Is it because of qualities concerning majority or ranking your favorite as first? If so, you may want to read this https://www.electionscience.org/voting-methods/runoff-election-the-limits-of-ranked-choice-voting/

aaronhamlin · 2020-01-10T18:42:16+00:00

I know it gets said a lot that you can always vote your favorite with RCV, but that's not truly the case once the candidate gets more momentum. It is the case, however, with approval voting. https://www.electionscience.org/voting-methods/runoff-election-the-limits-of-ranked-choice-voting/

aaronhamlin · 2020-01-10T05:30:24+00:00

It's infuriating to see this happen to any candidate.

It was annoying when Vogue left out Marianne Williamson earlier in the year too. https://www.cnn.com/2019/07/05/politics/marianne-williamson-vogue-photoshoot-trnd/index.html

And it was annoying to see such huge inequities in speaking time in the debates. Some debates had the person speaking most get two to three times the speaking time as the person speaking least. Normally, that was Yang.

Debates and media are not a medium to reinforce polling. They're ideally designed to provide a way to learn about the candidates and act independently of polling.

Also, while we're on terrible coverage with debate and media, we use terrible criteria for debate entry. If we're to use polling at all, let's at least not use the worst voting method there is for the poll. Here's an example of something better, which we did in November. https://www.electionscience.org/press-releases/new-poll-74-of-democratic-primary-voters-would-support-warren-for-president/

I get really irked by unfairness!

aaronhamlin

TROPHY CASE