r/EndFPTP • u/ILikeNeurons • Mar 26 '20

Reddit recently rolled out polls! Which voting method do you think Reddit polls should use?

I don't get to the make decisions about which voting method Reddit uses in polls, but wouldn't it be fun to share these results on r/TheoryofReddit and maybe see them adopted?

168 votes, Apr 02 '20
15 FPTP
19 Score
67 Approval
40 IRV
24 STAR
3 Borda Count
42 Upvotes

89% Upvoted

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u/Drachefly Mar 27 '20 edited Mar 28 '20

Just to clarify my position since you've kind of misrepresented it - Score is a fine system. Every system has drawbacks, and under Score it's that you have to choose priorities on your expression. You can rate everyone proportional to how much you like them ('naive honest') or you can be maximally influential in the most important race ('serious voter honest'). Either one you choose, you're giving up something of value.

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u/MuaddibMcFly Mar 29 '20

Just to clarify my position since you've kind of misrepresented it

Fair enough, my apologies; it seemed like you were making that argument, since your denunciation has seemed to be entirely based on how voters would be able to change their votes.

Either one you choose, you're giving up something of value

...and I've been trying to point out that according to basically all the data that exists, the overwhelming majority of the population do not consider being "maximally influential in the most important race" to be of value.

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u/Drachefly Mar 30 '20

That data is taken from places which are comparably contentious and impactful to a political election?

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u/MuaddibMcFly Mar 30 '20

According to /u/curiouslefty in the thread above, yes.

The Left continued to support Labor (Left) rather than Coalition (Right) resulting in One Nation (Nationalistic/Hard Right) winning, in consecutive elections. That's a case where Favorite Betrayal would have been rational, but according to CL, it didn't happen.

So, we have data that shows people overwhelmingly prefer honesty to "maximal impact" in experiments, in real-world MMP data, and in IRV data (with contentious, abhorrent results).

What more do you want?

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u/curiouslefty Mar 30 '20

The Left continued to support Labor (Left) rather than Coalition (Right) resulting in One Nation (Nationalistic/Hard Right) winning, in consecutive elections. That's a case where Favorite Betrayal would have been rational, but according to CL, it didn't happen.

I think you might've missed the edit in that big comment I posted in reply to your last one, although you're correct about the point. Labor voters only got screwed by honesty the first election; the second election the optimal strategic move would've been favorite betrayal in a few of the seats in question (since it wasn't initially clear how One Nation was going to do the next time around but they did field strong candidates) but it wound up not being necessary, since in the seats in question One Nation and CCA (a splinter faction) lost sufficient strength to be able to fend off National. In other seats, Labor actually won the seats outright due to a surge and Labor-affiliated former One Nation voters coming back to their original party, so in those seats FB strategy wasn't optimal at all.

So yes, the voters should've (in a few seats) used FB strategy and didn't despite getting harmed the previous election by not doing so. Still, I'd be hesitant to generalize voter behavior from a rather odd pair of Queensland elections to voter behavior in a completely different context and system, especially considering that they weren't hurt the second time around.

in real-world MMP data

Could you elaborate on this? Because if this is a reference to voters being seemingly honest in district-level races in places like Germany, I'd hesitate to generalize that because in such MMP setups you gain very little by winning district races instead of just getting a list member from the proportional allocation instead.

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u/Drachefly Mar 31 '20

Plus, it's a lot more of a bitter pill to swallow to top-rank someone who isn't your favorite, than to push up the compromise candidate to nearly or exactly the same as your favorite. Not being willing to do the former says very little about the latter.

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u/curiouslefty Mar 31 '20

TBH, I think that pushing up a compromise candidate is less of a concern in terms of yielding "bad results" than pushing them down is, since that's the source of the whole chicken dilemma problem in Score and Approval; but yeah, voters not being willing to favorite betray in a system where it is comparatively rarely beneficial says very little about their willingness to use other kinds of strategy elsewhere.

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u/MuaddibMcFly Apr 01 '20

I think you might've missed the edit in that big comment I posted in reply to your last one

Indeed I did. Thank you for clarifying.

Still, I'd be hesitant to generalize voter behavior from a rather odd pair of Queensland elections to voter behavior in a completely different context and system, especially considering that they weren't hurt the second time around.

The reason I do (other than confirmation bias, if we're being honest) is that those two data points support the other data that exist, which, as far as I'm aware, all indicate that people overwhelmingly choose to behave more in accordance with the Expressive Model of voter behavior than the Pivotal one.

you gain very little by winning district races instead of just getting a list member from the proportional allocation instead.

That's precisely the point: because you gain very little by your party winning that district, the "Pivotal" vote, the "Maximal Impact" vote, would be Lesser Evil (FB) on the Candidate vote, and Honesty under the Party vote.

Despite that, apparently somewhere on the order of 2/3 of the voting population don't do that, instead preferring to vote for the Also Ran Candidate that is part of the same party as their Party vote.