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Ranked Voting Articles

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Paul Cohen
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Some readers of this series on Balanced Voting may have noticed that it includes a sub-series on Ranked Voting. I have maintained that sub-series because of the high level of interest in IRV. There remains a high level of interest in those articles but now there are forty of them and it seems as though some additional help is needed for navigating among them. The purpose of this article is simply to give a brief synopsis of what to expect from reading the article.

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6/2/2014

What's Wrong With Instant Runoff Voting?

This was the very first of these articles about Ranked-choice Voting (IRV). It mostly addresses the complexity of the system and the difficulties it causes for voters who may consider multiple candidates as equally good or bad.

6/3/2014

Instant Runoff Balanced Voting (IRBV)

Many articles in the Balanced Voting series introduce and criticize one or another voting system that is balanced (allowing voters the choice of voting either support or opposition. This one introduces a system that, mimicking IRV, tallies the ballots iteratively, but with the individual iterations being conducted using a balanced voting system, Balanced Plurality Voting, that is otherwise like plurality voting.

6/17/2014

Instant Runoff or Approval?

Next to IRV, Approval Voting is probably the second most widely known alternative voting system. It has been favored in academic circles but not in political ones. This very short article re-visits a problem that IRV suffers from when voters are faced with multiple candidates seeming equally good or poor choices. In contrast, approval voting is an evaluative system that allows voters to assign identical ratings to similar candidates.

2/16/2016

Self-Expression Versus Actual Effectiveness in Voting

No doubt there are many explanations for the popularity of IRV, but undeniably it is appealing to voters accustomed only to plurality voting. So, it surprised me, when I first started thinking seriously about voting systems, that this enthusiasm was not often shared by serious students of voting systems. Voters (who greatly outnumber the technically inclined) seem focused on expressing themselves and IRV does appear to offer a grand opportunity for expression. But technicians tend to be to be more cautious about what may be hidden flaws in a complicated system. This article was the first of several articles to present an example of things that might go awry in IRV elections. It illustrates an election in which the first candidate to be eliminated was surely the consensus candidate whom voters would most widely support.

4/10/2016

Isn't IRV a Great System for Voting?

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Attended college thanks to the generous state support of education in 1960's America. Earned a Ph.D. in mathematics at the University of Illinois followed by post doctoral research positions at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton. (more...)
 

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Paul Cohen

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  New Content

Is this useful? If so I might add a similar article covering all of the Balanced Voting series.

Submitted on Wednesday, Apr 9, 2025 at 5:09:09 PM

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William WAUGH

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  New Content

A few to add to the list:

- rcvchangedalaska.com/
- electowiki.org/wiki/William_Robert_Ware
- electowiki.org/wiki/Instant-runoff_voting

Submitted on Wednesday, Apr 9, 2025 at 9:08:35 PM

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Paul Cohen

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Reply to William WAUGH:   New Content

Thanks for the pointers. The Alaska example seems particularly interesting, but I'll have to set aside some time to study it.

Submitted on Thursday, Apr 10, 2025 at 11:51:40 AM

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Paul Cohen

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One of my routines each morning is to update a spreadsheet to keep track of how many times these articles have been downloaded. It's a minor chore that takes only a few minutes, but it helps keep me in touch with what topics are currently of interest. Recently I've noticed an increase in ranked choice articles and in proportional representation. Perhaps some are considering the use of ranked-choice voting for electing committees.


I should point out that, aside from the many problems I have outlined in earlier articles, ranked choice voting is particularly ill-suited for electing multiple candidates to a committee. The objection is the very practical problem of designing a ballot. The number of candidates will grow larger as the committee size increases and surely at twice the rate or more. And the usual ballot design for ranked voting uses a separate column for each candidate. If a committee is to have eight members, there could easily be thirty or more candidates and it would be quite easy for voters to get confused about which column is the one they want to mark.


BAV may also be judged as unacceptable but because available voting machines do not support BAV. But BAV would require only two columns. Approval voting would require only one column and the machines for approval voting are both available and widely used. Compared to ranked-choice voting, approval voting would seem to be a better choice. I would note that voting machines that already support approval voting could add support for BAV pretty easily since BAV amounts to conducting two approval elections and then computing the difference between each of the two tallies.


Following the Bush v Gore election, there was considerable concern about the hacking of the voting machines and most countries have avoided them for that reason. Trump made such objections regarding the 2020 election, though the courts consistently found no basis for his objections. The Democratic Party has never shown much concern about such problems, either, but I read recently that Finland destroyed all of their voting machines. Apparently they have gone back to hand-counting of paper ballots. They had judged the voting machines to be unsuitable for any election, anywhere.


But with proportional representation there is an entirely different way for BAV to become particularly useful. With proportional representation there are committees making decisions rather than individuals. And no doubt these committees would adopt plurality voting to make their decisions; its simply what we all are so accustomed to doing. Because plurality voting is used, issues are structured to need only yes-or-no answers, even for selecting from among multiple alternatives.

These committees could and should consider using BAV voting instead. This topic was treated in what was a very popular article last year.

Submitted on Monday, Apr 28, 2025 at 8:39:31 AM

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