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April 9, 2025

Ranked Voting Articles

By Paul Cohen

Articles relating to ranked-choice voting seem to be of particular interest to many readers. As an aid to navigating through these articles, this one provides, as a tour guide, a short synopsis of each of the forty articles that precede it.

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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.

Tour Guide
Tour Guide
(Image by JSmith Photo from flickr)
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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?

There is not much new in this article; it was a summary of the earlier articles and an introduction to a defect with plurality voting that is often called the spoiler effect. IRV proponents often appeal effectively to IRV's ability to avoid the most common example of the spoiler effect. But recent articles in this series show that IRV still is subject to more subtle versions of this defect.

3/7/2017

Ranked Voting

This article introduces a variation on IRV called IRRV (Instant-runoff removal voting) that would seem to improve on IRV itself. The article's title is a bit ironic, however. IRRV and IRBV both fail to be ranked voting systems though they have a similar look and feel; they both are balanced, however, in that they treat support and opposition as equally important.

4/6/2017

Instant Runoff - Balanced once Again

Building on the previous article, this one considers applying the ideas of IRBV to IRRV instead of to IRV. The conclusion is that nothing is accomplished; we get IRBV again, though through a more devious route.

Arrow's Theorem and Overstatements

As the title suggests, this article brings up the topic of Arrow's Theorem. Though without going into the technical details of that theorem, its essence is outlined, and the question is raised why, despite this work, ranked voting systems remain such a popular idea.

6/13/2018

A First Experience with Ranked Voting

Maine has adopted IRV for most of its elections. This is the story of my first experience using this alternative voting system. The example suggests that IRV may present increasing difficulties for ballot design as the number of candidates increases.

12/10/2018

A Voter's Quandary

This article reveals circumstances that are apt to present voters with difficult choices using either approval voting or plurality voting difficult and how these difficulties vanish with BAV.

7/8/2019

Two Properties for Categorizing Voting Systems

This article addresses what was previously a common practice in discussions of score voting systems. It was common practice to ignore the possibility of a voter failing to indicate a score for one of the candidates. Aside from the case of approval voting, how this is handled can affect an election outcome.

10/15/2019

Older Ranked-Choice Voting Systems

What used to be called IRV has recently come to be known as ranked-choice voting. But here are other voting systems that as them to rank the candidates in order, difficult and inaccurate as sometimes that is. So Borda voting, along with its infinitely many variations deserve to be called ranked voting as well (that word "choice" carries some surprising baggage). These older voting systems are discussed in this article.

12/16/2019

What Could be Wrong with Ranked-Choice Voting?

As the title suggests, this article lists numerous reasons to object to ranked-choice voting and incidentally, to prefer BAV instead. A later article (dated 2/22/2022) provides a more extensive treatment of this same topic, and even more recent articles (such as Spoiled Again and Another Ranked-Choice Spoiler) provide additional examples that would deserve to be included as well.

2/23/2021

Just Think about Runoff Voting

Using ranked-choice voting, you do not have to submit a complete list of candidates; you are free to leave some off. However, the effects of doing so may surprise many voters. A voter might reasonably expect abstaining to be treated as a neutral action, not affecting the prospects of that omitted candidate. But instead, leaving a candidate off the list results in the harshest penalty an IRV voter can inflict on that candidate.

5/2/2021

Shooting Down Ranked Voting Systems

Intuitively, IRRV seems to offer an improvement to IRV and perhaps it does. But in this article, it is shown that the example of election failure with IRV with only a slight modification illustrates a similar failure for an IRRV election.

5/13/2021

What is Wrong with our Primaries?

The inadequacy of plurality voting is particularly profound when it comes to our primary elections. Unlike general elections, primaries often have three or more viable candidates competing for a party's nomination and plurality voting is profoundly unsuited for this purpose. And ranked-choice voting is not much more suitable; that is the topic of this article.

8/21/2021

What is Right about Plurality Voting?

We come naturally to the use of plurality voting. It is simple and it is what our cave-man ancestors surely used. In fact, its use seems to have been used by pre-human species and even among species we do not credit with much intelligence. This article encourages the adoption of a better way to vote.

9/9/2021

Voters Need to Understand How Votes are Counted

Whether we like it or not, psychological factors play a big role in our elections. And voters are often ignorant about details regarding how their votes will be counted. Some examples are provided in this article. Included here is a numeric example to show how tallies change in a score election depending on how the numeric scores are assigned; this illustrates how the choice affects the tally but not the outcome.

10/11/2021

Can We End the Two-Party System?

That IRV will end the two-party duopoly seems to be more a hope than a plan. In contrast, there is a clear plan for BAV to naturally undermine the polarized two-party duopoly. To emphasize this important point is the singular point of this article.

1/2/2022

How Biased is IRV?

We would expect elections, even more than polls, to make every effort to collect accurate data, but IRV exhibits considerable shortfalls in this respect. Most notibly, this is due to the inability of IRV voters to identify equally preferable candidates.

1/30/2022

Balanced Voting: Another View

This is merely a link to another series, at Substack, on the topic.

2/22/2022

Ranked Voting: The Good, The Bad and the Ugly

This is an especially long article that summarizes the problems with ranked-choice voting that had been addressed in earlier articles. There are some later articles that bring up further issues not yet appreciated at the time this article was written. Particularly significant are the later articles published on 11/5/23 and on10/1/2024.

4/20/2022

Contending with the NPV Dilemma

An effort is underway to deal with some of the election malfunctions that have occurred because of the Electoral College. This is called the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact (NPV ) and this initiative could possibly go into effect soon. Its passage would introduce difficulties for adopting BAV, or in fact, any alternative voting system for presidential elections.

7/5/2022

The Two-party Duopoly Sure, but What Else is Wrong?

Taking note that BAV provides a path for ending the two-party duopoly, this article surveys problems for the nation that can be blamed on that two-party duopoly.

10/1/2022

Obstruction of Voter Expression

As the title suggests, this article examines various voting systems with an eye to exposing in what ways they restrict the ability of voters to express their opinions about the candidates. I must add that there is an error in this article where I claimed that IRV voting eliminates the worry of a spoiler effect failure for elections with only three candidates. The article, Another Ranked-choice Spoiler, published on 10/1/2024 shows this to be incorrect.

10/24/2022

Words Perpetuating the Two-Party System

The word under discussion is opposition. Our culture has accustomed us to thinking we are voting against a candidate when we vote for some other candidate. This has an element of truth when there are only two candidates, but even then, there is a psychological distinction that gets obscured. Voters may understand this distinction even though their words so often obscure it.

11/21/2022

Reflections on Voters

Anyone interested in inventing a voting system probably harbors some assumptions about how voters think and behave. Such assumptions may be realistic, l but most likely there will be some fallacies as well. This suggests that we might examine a voting system to determine what voter behavior would make the voting system behave properly. This article takes that approach with several different voting systems, just to see whether that provides any insight into the voting systems. The apparent assumptions about human behavior may in some instances seem quite absurd.

2/16/2023

Escaping Duopoly

Until BAV is adopted and found to undermine the duopoly, we will not know for certain that it will. However, there is a persuasive argument for that to be what happens. For Approval Voting and for Ranked Choice Voting there is not even an argument that this will happen, merely an unsupportable hope for it.

6/4/2023

Balanced Condorcet Voting

Balanced voting systems allow voters to explicitly express opposition as easily as to express support for a candidate. But more broadly we might consider a voting system to be balanced even if it merely infers relative support and opposition, so long as, in tallying, the vote takes either expression equally into account. Condorcet Voting is a system that enjoys considerable interest among voting specialists, but it seems mostly on theoretical grounds. This article describes a system that, with the weaker notion of balance described above, is balanced. This article would seem to be mostly of theoretical interest.

7/8/2023

Condorcet and the Spoiler Effect

This article is a continuation of the previous one and likewise is primarily of theoretical interest.

9/27/2023

Comparing BAV with Ranked Choice Voting

IRV and BAV are such very different approaches to voting that it seems difficult to make comparisons and especially for comparing the systems with real-world data from an election. This article shows how measurements could be taken.

10/19/2023

Good Strategic Voting

Voting theory specialists are generally opposed to strategic voting strategies. As noted in an earlier article (published on 11/21/2022} they have in mind a model of how voters behave. But voters often do not behave as expected. But seen from the voters' perspective, the reason for voting strategically is often that the voting system itself it defective. It fails to allow them to adequately express how they feel. For them, strategic voting may offer them a way to more accurately express what they want. The article ends with an outline for a voting strategy for IRV voters to better approximate the advantages of BAV. The strategy will not eliminate the many faults of IRV, but it should be of some help.

1/5/2023

Spoiled Again

This article takes note of belief that IRV avoids the spoiler effect in elections with three or fewer candidates. But by describing the failure, in an IRV election with five candidates that depends on vote-splitting, it makes a strong case that this belief is mis-placed.

11/30/2023

Do IRV Voters Just Need Training?

The example in the previous article depends on vote splitting, but it also relies on the odd way that IRV treats abstentions. Voters are apt to not include candidates they are ambivalent about or whom they don't know on the ranked list they submit on their ballot. The example depends on some voters doing this as much as it depends on the vote splitting that is unavoidable with IRV when a voter judges two candidates as equally good. It does seem unlikely that better voter training could be a satisfactory solution to this problem.

2/25/2024

Illusions of Ending the Two-Party Duopoly

This article re-visits the claims of IRV advocates in promoting IRV as a viable way to end the duopoly.

3/11/2024

Families of Voting Systems

This article explores and gives names to several ways that different voting systems may closely resemble one-another.

6/30/2024

Runoff in a Star Election

Star voting is a system that has generated some pockets of enthusiasm. It consists of an initial score election (with six scores and the smallest score taken as the default) to narrow the field of candidates followed by an automatic plurality election (using votes derived from the score ballots) to make the final choice. The article suggests that the benefit of this is that the winner can boast winning a majority of votes in that final runoff; I learned of this explanation in a talk on the topic. Following the publication of this article I was told that the actual motivation was star voting's performance in election simulations using randomized votes. However, that cannot be the original motivation; star voting had to already have been a topic of interest before the simulations of it were performed.

10/1/2024

Another Ranked-Choice Spoiler

This presents another election, this time with only three candidates, that suffers from the spoiler effect. In addition to vote splitting, the iterative nature of the IRV vote tallies plays an important role. This example should raise alarm bells for other voting systems that use iterative simulated elections.

3/3/2025

Two-Candidate Elections

Usually, when we compare outcomes of an election when the voting system changes, we assume the voters remain the same and their attitudes toward the candidates remain unchanged. However, in these comparisons, extra voters are seen to come to the polls when they are offered a way to honestly and accurately express themselves. And of course that can change the outcome of the election.



Authors Bio:

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. Taught for several years at Lehigh University prior to a short stint at Bell Laboratories but followed by a much longer career at NEC punctuated by ten U.S. and international patents in the general area to semiconductor applications.

Now living in a comfortable Maine retirement community and focused on the prospect of upgrading democracy by means of an improved voting system.


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