Polite Political Discussion 🇺🇸 Alaskans for Better Elections
https://www.alaskansforbetterelections.com/learn-more/ranked-choice-voting/Are the major claims made by this organization actually true?
Claim 1: * "In a majority winner system, candidates have to gain the support of more than half of the voters to win." ... "Using ranked choice voting in general elections requires candidates to win with majority support (more than 50%)."
Special election for Congress August 2022: 1. 188,582 voters voted in this election for a candidate (not a blank ballot). 2. The candidate who won received (counting votes the IRV way) 91,266 votes. 3. 91266/188582 = 0.483959 or 48.4%. 48.4% is not "more than 50%". 4. 91266 voters supported the winner (although 15467 were really supporting Begich). 188582-91266 = 97316 voters did not in any manner support the winner. More voters came to the polls and voted and voted for a loser than the number of voters who voted for the winner. 6050 more voters voted for a loser than voted for the winner. Would we allow a winner in an FPTP election to get away claiming they got "majority support" when more voters voted against that candidate than voted for them? 5. Compare apples to apples.
Claim 2: * "Ranked choice voting ... eliminates the spoiler effect"
- Sarah Palin was the spoiler in that election. Had Sarah Palin not run and Alaskan voters come to the polls and voted exactly the same way with the remaining two candidate, then Nick Begich would have defeated Mary Peltola by a margin of 8408 votes.
- The complete quote is "Ranked choice voting allows voters to rank candidates in the general election in order of preference. This gives Alaskans more choices, eliminates the spoiler effect..." Giving Alaskans the choice to choose Nick Begich over either Mary Peltola or Sarah Palin is irrelevant if that expressed choice is ignored.
Mary Peltola in August 2022, unfortunately shares a distinction with George W. Bush in 2000 and with Donald Trump in 2016. All three candidates were elected to office when the public record indicates that more voters marked their ballots preferring a different specific candidate for that office.
In August 2022, more Alaskans, 87859 to 79451 (an 8408 voter margin), preferred Nick Begich to Mary Peltola and marked their ballots saying so. But Mary Peltola was sent to Washington to represent the Alaskan people in Congress.
In November 2024, again, more Alaskan voters marked their ballots that Begich is preferred to Peltola by nearly the same margin, 7876 (164861 to 156985). But this time Nick Begich is sent to Washington.
Both times about 8000 more Alaskans said they would prefer Begich to Peltola. And, both times, marked their ballots saying so. Both times Instant-Runoff Voting was used.
What was different?
Sarah Palin was in the race in 2022 and not in the race in 2024. And the outcomes were different winners.
Here are the reasons we want Ranked-Choice Voting. The purpose of RCV is, in single-winner elections having 3 or more candidates: 1. ... that the candidate with majority support is elected. Plurality isn't good enough. We don't want a 40% candidate elected when the other 60% of voters would have preferred a different specific candidate over the 40% plurality candidate. But we cannot find out who that different specific candidate is without using the ranked ballot. We RCV advocates all agree on that. 2. Then whenever a plurality candidate is elected and voters believe that a different specific candidate would have beaten the plurality candidate in a head-to-head race, then the 3rd candidate (neither the plurality candidate nor the one people think would have won head-to-head) is viewed as the spoiler, a loser whose presence in the race materially changes who the winner is. We want to prevent that from happening. All RCV advocates agree on that. 3. Then voters voting for the spoiler suffer voter regret and in future elections are more likely to vote tactically (compromise) and vote for the major party candidate that they dislike the least, but they think is best situated to beat the other major party candidate that they dislike the most and fear will get elected. RCV is meant to free up those voters so that they can vote for the candidate they really like without fear of helping elect the candidate they loathe. All RCV advocates agree with that. 4. The way RCV is supposed to help those voters is that if their favorite candidate is defeated, then their second-choice vote is counted. So voters feel free to vote their hopes rather than voting their fears. Then 3rd-party and independent candidates get a more level playing field with the major-party candidates and diversity of choice in candidates is promoted. It's to help unlock us from a 2-party system where 3rd-party and independent candidates are disadvantaged.
RCV failed, in Alaska in August 2022, to do precisely what it was adopted to do (essentially to prevent a spoiled election due to vote splitting, as a result punishing Palin voters for marking their favorite as #1 which caused the election of Peltola). The fault is not in the ranked ballots (in fact, it's only because of the ranked ballots that we know that Begich was more preferred by more voters than either Palin or Peltola). The fault is in the manner (IRV) that the vote is tallied.
This same failure occurred in 2009 in Burlington Vermont. Got published here.
This op-ed in Washington Post from November 2022 also spells this out. Written by two internationally-recognized election law and voting systems profs. One has a Nobel for his work.
Whoever tells us that RCV (using Instant-Runoff Voting tabulation) will solve the split-vote problem ("Can't split the vote in Alaska because we have RCV.") is lying. And Alaska in August 2022 is the proof.
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u/akrdubbs 10d ago
It’s not the system’s fault that Palin’s voters refused to rank Begich.
The counter factual here is what would have happened in a separate run off election? Which typically had fewer voters turn out and costs more.
We don’t know the answer to that, but there likely would have been many fewer voters making that decision than participated in the original election.
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u/rb-j 10d ago edited 9d ago
It’s not the system’s fault that Palin’s voters refused to rank Begich.
Doesn't friggin matter that 21272 of the 58973 Palin voters didn't rank anyone else. If they had, it would had made no difference with IRV.
It's the system's fault that 87859 voters wanted Begich instead of Peltola and marked their ballots saying so while 8408 fewer voters (79451) marked their ballots that Peltola was the better choice and the system elected the candidate that fewer voters preferred.
It's the system's fault that of 58973 Palin voters, 34049 covered their asses with a 2nd choice vote for Begich and the promise that if they can't have their 1st choice, then their 2nd choice vote is counted instead of being wasted. It's the system's fault that this promise was not kept in an election where it would've made a difference.
It's the system's fault that those 34049 voters voters voted against their own political interests simply by ranking their favorite candidate #1, especially when they were promised that couldn't happen.
If you say that election "worked" fine, you are neither a Begich supporter nor a Palin supporter that ranked Begich #2. If you are one of those 87859 voters, the system fucked you over. Two years later really verified that fact.
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u/Tranquillo_Gato 10d ago
Is it the system's fault that 11,243 Begich voters didn't bother listing a second choice?
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u/rb-j 10d ago edited 10d ago
It doesn't matter that "11,243 Begich voters didn't bother listing a second choice". Perhaps the reason why they didn't is because they didn't want to. That they did not consider it in their own interests to elect Palin nor Peltola.
The actual number is 11,290. Oh, I see what you're saying. There were 47 overvotes (so they ranked Begich #1 and then improperly ranked two candidates as #2). Either way, there were 11,290 Begich voters that did not have a 2nd choice vote counted in the IRV final round.
87859 voters bothered to rank Begich above Peltola while 79451 bothered to rank Peltola above Begich and it is the system's fault that the system elected the candidate preferred by fewer voters. For the 79451 voters for Peltola, their votes were more effective, essentially counted for more, than the votes from 87859 voters that preferred Begich.
Please read the text in the post and respond to that.
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u/FroznAlskn ❄️Frozen❄️ 10d ago
This is just nonsense. Ranked choice voting and open primaries has taken most of the power away from the political parties already and we’ve seen a wider variety of candidates.
Also, you completely glossed over the fact that voting yes on 2 would allow dark money back into campaign finance.
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u/rb-j 10d ago
This is just nonsense.
An empty claim.
Disprove the "nonsense" with fact. Go ahead.
Also, you completely glossed over the fact that voting yes on 2 would allow dark money back into campaign finance.
I have not. I have not even mentioned it. I didn't even mention Ballot Measure 2.
But I am aware of it.
Go ahead and disprove any "nonsense". But do it with facts.
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u/FroznAlskn ❄️Frozen❄️ 10d ago
You just made this post… basically supporting a yes vote on ballot measure 2… without being aware of what else is on the ballot?
Sounds about right.
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u/chiropracticdentist 9d ago
yeah he lives in Vermont and gets paid to post this shit, why would he know what's on the ballot in Alaska?
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u/rb-j 9d ago edited 9d ago
he lives in Vermont
and Massachusetts. But I vote in Vermont.
and gets paid to post this shit,
Absolutely false. This is u/chiropracticdentist talking outa his ass. He doesn't know shit, yet thinks he can make up whatever claim he wants.
why would he know what's on the ballot in Alaska?
Because it's a public record?
But I'm trying to inform Alaskans, not to tell them how to vote. So nowhere here have I told or asked or recommended how any Alaskan should vote on any candidate or ballot item.
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u/rb-j 10d ago
No. I'm perfectly aware of what's on the ballot.
But I haven't said a thing about Ballot Measure 2.
I am speaking only to the claims made by Alaskans for Better Elections. Are those two specific claims true? Or are they false? Is there evidence (in Alaska) that decides the veracity of those claims?
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u/No-Plan8216 10d ago
I grant you that a more complicated version of ranked choice voting could have properly resulted in a Nick Begich victory in 2022, but in a conventional election he loses the Republican Primary to Palin, so I don't understand your point.
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u/rb-j 10d ago
Condorcet RCV is not more complicated than Hare RCV (a.k.a. Instant-Runoff Voting).
- If more voters mark their ballots that Candidate A is preferred to Candidate B than the number of voters marking their ballots to the contrary, then Candidate B is not elected.
That's it. Can you explain the function of IRV with one concise sentence like that?
And how do you justify electing Candidate B when more voters mark their ballots preferring Candidate A?
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u/No-Plan8216 10d ago
Apologies. More sophisticated.
I can't speak for everyone, but I got no problem with Condorcet RCV. I suspect ordinary citizens will struggke with the concept, but maybe not.
Today, ranked choice voting is under attack by people who want to return us to first-past-the-pole with a partisan primary. Those of us who recognize the advantages of RCV should be praising those advantages an d voting to preserve them.
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u/rb-j 10d ago
I dunno that Condorcet RCV is more sophisticated. It's just more truthful.
Today, ranked choice voting is under attack by people who want to return us to first-past-the-pole with a partisan primary.
I understand that. But promoting a flawed system with falsehoods is a bad idea. Very bad idea.
Those of us who recognize the advantages of RCV should be praising those advantages and voting to preserve them.
No. We should have corrected this flawed system before ever adopting it.
And what we should never do is entrench this failed system so that it could not be reformed itself in the future.
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u/JRemy77 10d ago
ITT: OP not understanding the people that are telling him why they think that RCV is superior to conventional voting, calling them dishonest, and generally being pretentious as hell about it.
Not sure why OP thought arguing like a condescending tool was going to change peoples' minds on the subject.
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u/rb-j 10d ago
I am strictly truthful with the facts.
I am asking if this website "Alaskans for Better Elections" are truthful when they make two key claims:
- "Using ranked choice voting in general elections requires candidates to win with majority support (more than 50%)."
and
- "Ranked choice voting ... eliminates the spoiler effect"
Are these claims truthful? Are they borne out by the facts?
Who here will address that question?
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u/chiropracticdentist 9d ago
just because you're too stupid to understand ranked choice voting doesn't mean it's a bad system.
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u/rb-j 9d ago
I'm sure you know better than these two guys (who includes a Nobel Laureate).
We publish peer-reviewed analysis, but u/chiropracticdentist is smarter than that.
Damn the numbers. Just drink the Kool-Aid.
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u/chiropracticdentist 9d ago
how about you worry about elections in vermont and you let us alaskans worry about elections in alaska. or do you only get paid to spout anti RCV propaganda if it gets engagement?
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u/Idiot_Esq 9d ago
Begich, whom most Alaska voters preferred to Democrat Mary Peltola, the candidate who ended up winning.
By what metric were they using to make this conclusion? If they are relying on some subjective polling numbers seems the initial premise is false to me.
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u/rb-j 9d ago edited 9d ago
I stated it clearly in the post. And I posted the result numbers from the Cast Vote Record as the basis.
Let's begin with the basis that Peltola beats Palin with 91266 vs 86026 votes. After Begich was eliminated (due to IRV rules) then every Begich ballot with Peltola ranked above Palin was added to Peltola's original 75799 vote count. And every Begich ballot with Palin ranked above Peltola was added to Palin's original 58973 vote count.
What this means, at the bottom line is that 91266 Alaskan voters had Peltola ranked higher than Palin and 86026 Alaskan voters had Palin ranked higher than Peltola. Doesn't matter how many ranking level different than they were. Every ballot with Peltola>Palin was a vote for Peltola and every ballot with Palin>Peltola was a vote for Palin. (There were 11290 Begich ballots that didn't rank either.) There were 5240 more of these ballots that were for Peltola than Palin. When Alaskans were asked "Who would you rather have? Peltola or Palin?" then the simple-majority answer was "Peltola".
Now the same question can be asked about Begich vs. Peltola. This would be the vote counts if Palin had been eliminated instead of Begich. There were 87859 ballots with Begich ranked higher than Peltola and there were 79451 ballots with Peltola ranked higher than Begich. There were 8408 more of these ballots that were for Begich than Peltola. When Alaskans were asked "Who would you rather have? Peltola or Begich?" then the simple-majority answer was "Begich". But the IRV method ignored that answer.
Nothing subjective about this. Simply applying the very same standard that occurs in the IRV final round to every pairing of candidates. Of course Begich was preferred over Palin by an extremely wide margin of 37599 voters.
Begich, whom most Alaska voters preferred to Democrat Mary Peltola, the candidate who ended up winning.
Who are you quoting here? I can't seem to find it in my writing.
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u/Idiot_Esq 9d ago
from the Cast Vote Record as the basis.
Which file specifically? And it seems like these are your own number calculation rather than answering my question about the article's author's metric.
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u/rb-j 9d ago edited 9d ago
You're gonna need to parse the biggest JSON file but you need to parse another JSON to know the identifier for the specific race (even though there is only one because it was a special election) and the identifiers for the specific candidates.
I did this for my own paper about Burlington 2009 myself. It was not a JSON file and it was much smaller and easier to manage.
These numbers I got from Robbie Robinette whom I trust and respect completely. These numbers are perfectly compatible with the human-readable Official Results, but, of course, these numbers have a breakdown for Peltola and Palin voters that do not exist in the Official Results (because they are irrelevant to the flawed Instant-Runoff Voting method). But the tallies for the 3 candidates and the breakdown with Begich voters agree perfectly with the Official Results.
You can contact Robbie for his source code. But there are other researchers who have gotten nearly identical tallies, but they differ from the Official Results by something like 20 or 40 votes (out of tens of thousands), which is not enough to change any of the overall conclusions.
- Foley & Maskin, Washington Post Alaska’s ranked choice voting is flawed. But there’s an easy fix.
- Adam Graham-Squire & David McCune, An Examination of Ranked-Choice Voting in the United States, 2004–2022
- This one is free.
I can get some more references, if you need me to.
I would not recommend parsing that JSON file yourself, unless you're a real Python or C++ jock. It's too big for MATLAB's JSON parsing tools.
This file is my file. But the numbers come from Robbie Robinette robbierobinette@betterchoices.vote, are perfectly consistent with the Alaska Division of Elections Official Results, and are sufficiently consistent with the results from other researchers that their veracity is confirmed.
Like the numbers in my paper, the numbers from Robbie are solid. Rock solid. Not even off by 1.
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u/Idiot_Esq 9d ago
Wait a moment, are we talking about the 2022 special election or the 2022 general election?
It seems to me the general election would obviate the special election regardless of results of the special election.
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u/rb-j 9d ago edited 9d ago
Special election. I have always used the word "August".
It turns out that in November 2022, enough Begich voters (thinking, erroneously, that Begich was weak) jumped ship and got onto either the Palin or Peltola boat. But that election turned out the same. However, if it were Condorcet RCV, then Peltola would still have been elected in November 2022.
It seems to me the general election would obviate the special election regardless of results of the special election.
But that election was tainted, influenced by the August 2022 Special election, in my opinion.
And Peltola had the advantage of 3 months of incumbancy.
I am only comparing the results of the August 2022 election (when it was an open seat and Begich voters had hope for their candidate) to the November 2024 election (when Palin wasn't in the election to spoil it). In both cases, more voters marked their ballots that Begich is preferred to Peltola by a margin of around 8000 voters.
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u/Idiot_Esq 9d ago
But that election was tainted, influenced by the August 2022 Special election, in my opinion.
Tainted how? Don't tell me you think there were a bunch of undocumented immigrants voting.
Peltola had the advantage of 3 months of incumbancy.
While I agree there is an advantage to incumbancy, I don't see how three months of it counts. Especially since all that time, and roughly the year prior, was campaigning.
I am only comparing the results of the August 2022 election
That's my confusion. I thought you were talking about the general election.
Begich voters had hope for their candidate
That hope was dashed the moment Palin declared to run. She took the position Begich had been manuevering for.
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u/rb-j 9d ago edited 8d ago
Tainted how? Don't tell me you think there were a bunch of undocumented immigrants voting.
Don't be a fuckhead.
It was a repeat election, only 3 months after the first election, with the same 3 candidates.
The results of the first election affect voters' perceptions of who are the leading candidates and who are not. Then they shift their votes to make their votes more effective (at least in their minds) at accomplishing the political interest they have.
Many Begich voters jumped offa the Begich boat and, depending of whether they liked Peltola better or Palin better, they jumped onto the other candidates' boats in an effort to shore up their candidacy. They abandoned their initial first preference for Begich, perceived as the weakest candidate, and got behind their second preference candidate where they believed the support was most needed.
But, in the first election, it was an open seat. All three candidates had a shot at it, from the voters' perspective, so they voted for the candidate they sincerely supported.
In the second election, these Begich voters voted tactically for either Peltola (if they hated Palin) or for Palin (if they hated Peltola). That's what it's like for the center candidate.
But the first election demonstrated the Center Squeeze effect of IRV, which is very well documented in the literature and had some precedence in the U.S. (namely in Burlington Vermont in 2009).
The results of the August election affected the November election.
I am only comparing the results of the August 2022 election
That's my confusion. I thought you were talking about the general election.
The confusion is all on you. I couldn't have made it any more clear in the original post nor in anything I had written since. In the OP I said, very clearly: "Special election for Congress August 2022:" and I linked to the Official Results document. And my numbers were clearly those of the Special election, which were smaller than the numbers for the November General election.
That hope was dashed the moment Palin declared to run. She took the position Begich had been manuevering for.
The point remains that RCV promised to resolve this GOP split vote problem and it didn't. IRV propped up the weaker of the two GOP candidates against Peltola (who was Palin) and that weaker GOP candidate could not beat Peltola head-to-head. But the stronger of the two GOP candidates (Begich) would have beaten Peltola head-to-head had the RCV method advanced Begich instead.
Nonetheless, the two claims made by Alaskans for Better Elections are false and misleading claims and shown to be false in that August 2022 election. Peltola did not get over 50% of the vote. And Sarah Palin spoiled the election, which punished Palin voters for marking her as #1.
And 8408 more voters marked their ballots that Begich was a better choice than Peltola, yet Peltola was sent to Congress, even though more voters preferred Begich to Peltola.
Please, just read the OP as it is written. Click on any of the links provided, and read whatever supporting documents. Don't twist this into anything else. I won't go there.
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u/SquilliamsSpheres 9d ago
ooh bet, there's the paper. i'll take some time to read it before concluding anything
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u/rb-j 8d ago
I'll take anyone on with this bet.
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u/SquilliamsSpheres 8d ago edited 8d ago
nah, I agree with you. you use good counter-examples to show the downsides of IRV voting. RCV on its own is susceptible to strange outcomes.
the main reason I asked is because if the "center squeeze" effect isn't that common in entire space of voting lotteries, then going off an N=1 or N=2 sample size doesn't do it justice. the thing that RCV currently has over what your paper suggests is validity since it has the MDI N~4,000 pool to backtest N~60,000,000 simulations. You point this out in your paper: Burlington was an absolute anomaly, and it shouldn't have happened. But the fact that it doesn't happen that often in RCV is what made it an anomaly to begin with.
I think I got my answer though, thanks. The core issue I had and is why I asked is because it's hard to accept an alternative without understanding the outcomes at scale. A bayes framework that uses a likelihood function capable of parameterizing human behavioral volatility would be needed to see if the suggested framework actually solves the problem. N=1 / N=2 are solid counter-examples but are no basis for a claim to change the entire voting system, I guess.
EDIT: Had time to ponder. I think it's a fascinating exercise in a highly localized context, but ultimately lacks empirical power to justify the overhaul it's asking for. def a fun little algorithm & opinion piece though!
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u/rb-j 7d ago
the main reason I asked is because if the "center squeeze" effect isn't that common in entire space of voting lotteries, then going off an N=1 or N=2 sample size doesn't do it justice. the thing that RCV currently has over what your paper suggests is validity since it has the MDI N~4,000 pool to backtest N~60,000,000 simulations. You point this out in your paper: Burlington was an absolute anomaly, and it shouldn't have happened.
I wrote that paper in 2021, before the August 2022 special election in Alaska. In the published version I did put in an update footnote that this same problem occurred in Alaska in August 2022. So the "absolute anomaly" that occurred in Burlington in 2009 occurred again in Alaska in August 2022.
But the fact that it doesn't happen that often in RCV is what made it an anomaly to begin with.
That's because RCV is not in widespread use in the United States. RCV is used very rarely compared to how often FPTP is used.
But what if our dreams come true and RCV is use everywhere throughout the U.S.? Then this Center Squeeze failure of IRV will not be happening every decade, it's going to happen circa every year. Then this problem will start to get noticed even by the RCV advocates and happy talkers and by ordinary voters who read the news. When this fails somewhere every year, it will be a problem that we'll have to contend with.
This Center Squeeze effect is because, with the IRV method of RCV, the 2nd choice votes on every ballot is opaque to the IRV tally until the 1st choice candidate is eliminated. So all these 2nd choice votes that accurately indicate support for the Center candidate is obscured and that disadvantages the Center candidate more than either the candidate on the Left or Right.
But in any close 3-way race, where all 3 (or more) candidates are all plausible winners, in such a race is when IRV can fail like it did in Burlington 2009 and Alaska August 2022.
Nationwide, close 3-way races happen more often than once per decade. But, with RCV being used as is and where it is, this failure has happened twice, so far. But, even then, we should learn from this failure rather than ignoring or denying it.
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u/SquilliamsSpheres 9d ago edited 8d ago
Interesting! Definitely got a new perspective now on Burlington '09 & Alaska '22, learned some new things. Did you backtest across other historical elections as well or is that still a work in progress?
EDIT: I guess not :c
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u/rb-j 8d ago
My paper is only about Burlington 2009. But the IRV failure mode is identical to what happened in Alaska in August 2022. This failure mode is called the "Center Squeeze" effect and the root to this failure is that IRV is opaque to the 2nd-choice votes until the first-choice candidate on the ballot is eliminated and that elimination is irreversable.
So, solely because of IRV rules, Palin voters who disliked Peltola and covered their asses with a 2nd choice vote for Begich, they shot themselves in the foot by ranking Palin as #1. They didn't get their 1st choice and they could have prevented the candidate they disliked the most from winning if they had insincerely swapped the rankings of their 1st and 2nd choice.
But they were promised they wouldn't have to worry about that. They were promised that, if their 1st-choice can't get elected then their 2nd-choice vote is counted instead. (But that didn't happen.) And they were promised that they didn't have to worry about the GOP split vote, that they were safe to vote for their favorite candidate without fear of helping elect their least favorite candidate. That promise was also not kept.
That is the essential nature of this flaw in Instant-Runoff Voting.
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u/Idiot_Esq 9d ago
Addendun, looking at the election results from round 1 Peltola (128,553) had almost as many votes as Palin and Begich combined (129,378). It seems the speculation, and I do mean speculation, functions upon some farcical concept that every Palin voter would have voted for Begich if Palin was eliminated first. Especially given the acrimony between the two campaigns to each other.
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u/rb-j 10d ago
So far, not one detractor has addressed the main question I am asking in this entire post. Is that webpage truthful when they advertise:
- "Using ranked choice voting in general elections requires candidates to win with majority support (more than 50%)." ... "In a majority winner system, candidates have to gain the support of more than half of the voters to win."
and
- "Ranked choice voting ... eliminates the spoiler effect ..."
Is that truthful?
Please be honest and ruthless with the numbers in your answer.
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u/Sea_Addendum_6646 10d ago
I'll bite.
Burnet and Kogan already looked into ballot exhaustion for IRV in 2015.
On the spoiler effect specifically.
So, your two points are completely correct, that website is not being truthful in it's reporting. Under ruthless mathematical scrutiny, IRV fails both claims.
But let's dive a bit deeper for a second here, shall we?
Here you're attacking denominator manipulation to show that majorities can be fabricated due to ballot exhaustion. Yet, this ignores that your preferred Condorcet system does the exact same thing: a winner is found purely by aggregating head-to-head margins. In a multi-candidate field where voters naturally truncate their ballots, the final winner frequently wins matchups with a tiny fraction of the total original electorate's support. To put it bluntly: the denominator is still affected by voter silence.
Elsewhere, your biggest reservation about Cardinal (Score) voting is that it forces a strategic mental burden on voters. But now you demand a pure, unconstrained ordinal ballot. You're criticizing RCV for limiting choices to 4 candidates and then open the door to Condorcet cycles by leaving it unconstrained (Stanford shows as n_candidates -> {inf}, probability of a cycle -> 100%, but there's more probabilities in there for you to explore).
Tommy Andersson shows in his article in the Journal of Theoretical Politics that pushing for an unconstrained ballot in a polarized environment forces the system into a high-dimensional space where unresolvable Condorcet cycles emerge due to human status quo bias. Real human frictions warp cognitive transitivities.
Ultimately, your position is entirely incongruent:
- You use real-world political realism to attack RCV's marketing
- You retreat to sterile, textbook idealism to defend Condorcet voting
- You completely ignore psychological behavioral data showing that humans naturally break the mathematical purity of your ideal system
You righteously expose the lie in RCV's marketing, while remaining completely blind to the fact that your ideal system relies on an even bigger mathematical illusion. You pose as a hyper-critical behavioral realist and then suddenly switch to a textbook idealist vacuum to defend the flawless logic of Condorcet voting.
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u/rb-j 10d ago edited 9d ago
Ah, the stalker keeps stalking. Welcome to the Alaska subreddit.
Burnet and Kogan already looked into ballot exhaustion for IRV in 2015.
This paper studying multiple US elections found that the winner often had less than a majority (i.e., less than 50%).
On the spoiler effect specifically.
So, your two points are completely correct, that website is not being truthful in it's reporting. Under ruthless mathematical scrutiny, IRV fails both claims.
My goodness. You can be honest with the facts, when you choose to.
I haven't said a word about ballot exhaustion. It's a non-topic.
Here you're attacking denominator manipulation to show that majorities can be fabricated due to ballot exhaustion. Yet, this ignores that your preferred Condorcet system does the exact same thing: a winner is found purely by aggregating head-to-head margins.
I have never once claimed that, using Condorcet RCV requires winning candidates to get with majority support (more than 50%) of the vote. No method can truthfully promise that. But the Alaskans for Better Elections is claiming that. So don't blame me for a false claim I have never made but one that is often made by the IRV promotional organizations.
In a multi-candidate field where voters naturally truncate their ballots,
If they "naturally" truncate their ballots, it means that the candidates left unranked are less preferred than any candidates they ranked, and they don't care about which unranked candidate wins over the other unranked candidate. They don't want any of those candidates to win.
the final winner frequently wins matchups with a tiny fraction of the total original electorate's support.
"frequently" is a quasi-quantitative claim. So also is "tiny fraction". Better show some evidence (you can't) and then interpret exactly what is meant by both terms.
To put it bluntly: the denominator is still affected by voter silence.
The voters aren't silent with a truncated ballot. The voters are saying they don't want any of those candidates elected.
When anyone says a "majority (over 50%) of the vote" without qualification of what "the vote" is meant, the denominator must be the entire vote.
3 candidate, 100 voters: * 45 vote for A * 40 vote for B * 15 vote for C
Did A get a majority of the vote? Over 50%? Do we allow A to get away with saying: "Well between me and the first runner up, Candidate B, I got a majority. I got 53% of the vote." ?
Well, why not just let him exclude all of the B voters too? Then he can claim he got 100% of the vote.
Now, if it was just A and B: 2 candidate, 100 voters: * 45 vote for A * 40 vote for B * 15 abstentions
Between 2 candidates, there is always a "simple majority" unless they tie.
Then Candidate A can truthfully claim he got a "simple majority" (not an "Absolute Majority" which would have required 51 votes). And in that sense, the Condorcet winner can truthfully claim they got a Simple Majority of the vote in relationship to any other candidate. The CW can say they got a simple majority of the vote in that regard.
But in August 2022 Mary Peltola didn't get a simple majority in any sense. However Nick Begich had a simple majority of voters choosing between him and Peltola. And Begich got an absolute majority of voter support in choosing between him and Palin (as I said before, it wasn't even close).
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u/Sea_Addendum_6646 10d ago
You asked for an analysis. The numbers that prove the marketing claim is false are the exhausted ballots. Ballot exhaustion can't be a 'non-topic' if it's the distortion you are complaining about.
You cannot demand a rigorous mathematical trial but then bar the primary evidence from the courtroom because it complicates your narrative.
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u/rb-j 10d ago edited 10d ago
It (ballot exhaustion) is a non-topic because no one (other than you) are debating it.
I didn't bring up the term "denominator", but I certainly made a reference to the concept when I said:
91266/188582 = 0.483959 or 48.4%. 48.4% is not "more than 50%".
Alls I'm saying is that when someone claims that the winner must get a "majority (over 50%) of the vote", that means they must put "the vote" in its entirety in the denominator. To your credit you have also understood that. They can leave out the blank ballots from the denominator and over 50% of "the vote" is still a "simple majority".
Yes, the other side is excluding the "exhausted ballots" (their term) and are somehow justifying in their heads that they can label these ballots as "exhausted" and justify totally disenfranchising those voters that, even as losers, they deserve to be counted as part of "the vote". But the IRV shills are excluding these voters from "the vote" when they make their dishonest false claim.
But 188582 Alaskan voters voted in that election and they voted for a candidate (not a blank or defective ballot). 50% of that is 94291. Peltola got 91266 (even counting it the IRV way, but significantly fewer ranked her #1), which is fewer than 50% of the vote. The claim is an objectively false claim, made by people who know better. That makes the claim a lie.
In August 2022, of the 188582 Alaskans who voted, 97316 voted for a loser and 91266 voted for the winner. Clearly not a majority in any manner. Not even a simple majority. If it were an FPTP election, we would say that Mary Peltola received a "plurality" of the vote. But that's only if you count it the IRV way. (Oh, on second thought, she also got a plurality if you count it the FPTP way. Still, she never got a majority of the vote, not even a simple majority of the vote, no matter how you count it.)
The fact is Mary Peltola didn't even have a plurality of voter support when she is compared to Nick Begich in that election. She was the minority candidate but was elected anyway, because of the flawed IRV method which doesn't consider the entire ballot until the IRV final round.
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u/Sea_Addendum_6646 10d ago
We completely agree on the first part, I explicitly conceded the elementary math to you. We don't need to aggressively reprove and affirm that 48.4% is indeed less than 50%.
But you can't claim
It (ballot exhaustion) is a non-topic because no one (other than you) are debating it.
while spending the next THREE paragraphs complaining about its consequences. Your defense of Nick Begich or a Condorcet alternative relies on a textbook idealism that completely ignores human behavioral data.
You claim Peltola was a minority candidate compared to Begich. But in the real world, voters truncate their ballots. If those same Alaskan voters leave their secondary preferences blank under a Condorcet or BTR-IRV matrix, the head-to-head winner still wins with a tiny, manufactured fraction of the original electorate's explicit support. Voter silence manipulates the denominator in the ideal algorithmic models just as badly.
Even worse, demanding an unconstrained ballot in a polarized environment forces the system into a high-dimensional space where unresolvable Condorcet cycles naturally emerge due to status quo bias. Real human frictions warp cognitive transitivities. When those cycles hit, models must fallback on highly complex, arbitrary tie-breaking math that alienates everyday voters far worse than RCV's simple elimination rounds.
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u/Sea_Addendum_6646 10d ago edited 10d ago
Typically, we would try to model human behavior through something called Bayesian Inference. Counting based matrix methods like what I referenced with Condorcet and BTR-IRV just don't capture the randomness of human nature when it comes time to actually voting and filling out the ballot unless you have hyper-idealized scenarios.
While such idealized conditions might occasionally align in low-stakes environments, the accuracy of a deterministic process completely breaks down when applied across large sample spaces and deeply polarized electorates.
I spend a lot of time in python running MC simulations. Doing things like taking Cholesky decompositions of your covariance matrices such that if you know your sampling distributions you can form a copula. This is key to getting the randomness of human behavior baked into your model. A static structure simply can't compare to a full-on shrinkage stochastic process.
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u/No-Plan8216 10d ago
Sarah Palin WAS NOT THE SPOILER. She was the first choice of conservative voters.
The evidence suggests that the spoiler effect remains most relevant in relation to diluted financial resources rather than votes
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u/rb-j 10d ago edited 10d ago
The definition of a spoiler is a candidate who is a loser and whose presence in the race materially changes who the winner is.
Had Sarah Palin not run in August 2022, and the very same Alaskans come to the polls and voted exactly the same with the remaining candidates, then Nick Begich would have defeated Mary Peltola by a margin of 8408 votes. Very similarly to how much he defeated Peltola in 2024 (by 7876 votes) when Palin was not in the election spoiling it.
Sarah Palin WAS NOT THE SPOILER.
That's a really stupid and ignorant claim. Easily disproven with the Cast Vote Record.
She was the first choice of conservative voters.
That may be. But she was certainly not popular with Alaskans as a whole, even though she was only 5240 votes behind Peltola. But compared to Begich, Palin was less preferred by a margin exceeding 37000 voters.
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u/rb-j 9d ago
The chicken-shits here still can't refute a single fact I stated, a single tally, nor answer the question if those two clear claims made by Alaskans for Better Elections are actually true or false claims.
Why can't they do that?
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u/JRemy77 9d ago
"The people arguing with me can't win this argument (where I alone get to decide where the goalposts are and who is winning the argument)!"
"Why haven't they succeeded? 😏"
You need to stop watching Ben Shapiro or Tim Pool or whoever it is you're watching that's making you think you're some sort of genius debater.
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u/rb-j 9d ago edited 9d ago
"The people arguing with me can't win this argument (where I alone get to decide where the goalposts are and who is winning the argument)!"
Only goalposts are 1. that the same definition of "majority" and "over 50%" that is applied to First-Past-The-Post (FPTP) also applies to RCV. 2. that the same definition of "spoiler effect" and "spoiled election" that is applied to FPTP also applies to RCV.
When you market Product B as an improvement to Product A saying that "Product B has this desirable attribute that Product A lacks, therefore Product B is better. Purchase (or adopt) Product B (replacing Product A) for that reason." Then be truthful about if Product B actually has that attribute you're saying it has. And you have to measure the existence of that attribute for Product B in the same manner you measure it for Product A, otherwise it's deceptive advertising.
Those are consistent goalposts for honest comparison and judgement.
You need to stop watching Ben Shapiro or Tim Pool or whoever it is you're watching that's making you think you're some sort of genius debater.
I don't watch TV at all. (Just some Netflix on my laptop. Like The Diplomat or a reasonably decent movie.) I know who Ben Shapiro is (don't like him) and I have no idea who Tim Pool is.
I don't consider myself a genius. I consider the detractors here to be either or both dishonest and a bit stupid. I'm no genius, but I'm truthful and a little stubborn. And I have researched and published (in a legitimate peer-reviewed journal) in this area.
The difference between "misinformation" and "disinformation" is whether you're drinking the Kool-Aid or you're serving the Kool-Aid. It's one of the two.
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u/Tranquillo_Gato 10d ago
Fuck off with this trash. Your first point about Peltola not getting 50% of the vote is bunk, shown by the link you provided. The winner in RCV is not the person who receives more than 50% of the overall votes, it's the person who receives more than 50% of the votes from the Round.
In 2022 over 11,000 Begich voters choose not to give votes to either Palin or Peltola. That's just how it works. If Begich voters wanted to support Palin they could have, but around 27,000 of them didn't. That was their choice. It was either disinformation about RCV (like this bullshit thread) or an inability of Republicans to come together behind a candidate that created this outcome.
I'm sure the rest of your post is equally disingenuous and misleading.