News for hackers. Stuff that matters.

A comment on Florida bans ranked-choice voting in new elections law. Parent comment

Re:Florida bans ranked-choice voting in new elections law by dane-pgp on Tuesday April 26, 2022 @08:44PM (#31174959)
There is, however, an argument that the longer it takes to produce a result from an election, the less confidence people have in the result, either because they lose the cause-and-effect feeling between going to the polling station and learning the result, or because bad actors deliberately try to undermine the process by filling social media with false narratives (and encouraging intimidation of poll workers) while the count goes on.

Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying the result should be announced immediately, using electronic counting (and definitely not online voting), but 13 counts and then 10 days of recounts for a single district (Dublin South-Central[0] in 1992) is hard to justify, and I think that the voting system makes the process slower/more expensive and more error-prone. For comparison, apparently the most recounts for a UK general election seat was seven.[1]

Also, I believe that IRV/STV/RCV doesn't support the summability criterion[2], which leads to more centralisation of the vote counting process.

[0] https://www.thejournal.ie/closest-irish-election-results-in-...

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Kingdom_general_electio...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Summability_criterion

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Florida bans ranked-choice voting in new elections law by rbanffy on Tuesday April 26, 2022 @09:34PM (#31175231)
Even after the 1992 incident happened, the system continued to be used. I didn't live here back then, but, according to my local friends, after that, counting was automated for a couple elections and, then, it was agreed that while automation offered faster results, the manual process was more trusted by the people.

> bad actors deliberately try to undermine the process by filling social media with false narratives

I'm glad the voting system also weeds out extremists. The problem is that, in the US, said extremists are already in power, because current voting systems don't punish extremism enough.

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Florida bans ranked-choice voting in new elections law by singron on Wednesday April 27, 2022 @11:19AM (#31181004)
The article seems to confuse RCV (voting by ranking a list of candidates) and IRV (a specific way of choosing the winner from such ballots). I'm not sure to which the law applies. Wikipedia has a disambiguation page for RCV that lists these 2 concepts.

There are ranked voting schemes that obey the summability criterion, although they aren't as commonly used as IRV and STV.

It's also quite practical to use a non-summable method with a limited set of candidates since any non-contrived method can use a summary array of length n! by using a count of each possible ranking. E.g. a large 10 candidate election could use only a 15MB summary array.

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Florida bans ranked-choice voting in new elections law by specialist on Wednesday April 27, 2022 @01:22PM (#31182941)
Delayed counts, recounts, and challenged results with our FPTP elections are now the norm.

How could RCV be any worse?

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Florida bans ranked-choice voting in new elections law by noTooMooch on Wednesday April 27, 2022 @01:16AM (#31176584)
Congress has an approval rating of 20%

There is no faith in the system as is

[ Parent | on HN ]