EA - [Cause Exploration Prizes] Voting Methods by Marcus Ogren

Link to original articleWelcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: [Cause Exploration Prizes] Voting Methods, published by Marcus Ogren on August 17, 2022 on The Effective Altruism Forum. This essay was submitted to Open Philanthropy's Cause Exploration Prizes contest. If you're seeing this in summer 2022, we'll be posting many submissions in a short period. If you want to stop seeing them so often, apply a filter for the appropriate tag! By Marcus Ogren What is the problem? The United States uses choose-one Plurality voting, in which voters may vote for only a single candidate, for most of its elections. This is a notoriously terrible way of determining leaders; it frequently leads to people who don’t reflect the preferences of the electorate getting elected, and bears much of the responsibility for the two-party system and excessive polarization. By switching to better voting methods we can avoid consequences of polarization such as legislative gridlock or a possible civil war. What are some better voting methods we might support? It is important to distinguish between single-winner and multi-winner voting methods. For electing someone to an executive office (e.g., governor), only a single-winner voting method can be used. For electing a larger body (such as a city council or the US House of Representatives) either a multi-winner voting method can be used or the jurisdiction can be divided into single-member districts that use a single-winner voting method. The multi-winner case can involve either at-large elections or splitting the jurisdiction into multi-member districts that each elect multiple representatives at once. Single-winner voting methods: Approval Voting: Every voter can vote for as many candidates as they like. Whoever gets the most votes wins. STAR Voting: Voters score the candidates from 0 to 5; multiple candidates may receive the same score. The two candidates with the highest total score advance to an automatic runoff with the already-cast ballots. In the runoff, each ballot counts as a single vote for whichever of the finalists is scored higher on it, regardless of the difference in scores. Condorcet Voting: Voters rank the candidates. To determine the winner, look at each ballot to see which candidate is preferred in every possible head-to-head matchup. The candidate who beats everyone else head-to-head wins. Instant Runoff Voting (IRV, the best-known form of Ranked Choice Voting): Voters rank the candidates. Each ballot counts as one vote to the candidate that is ranked the highest on it. If one candidate is the first choice on a majority of ballots, that candidate is elected. Otherwise, the candidate with the fewest voters is eliminated, and their votes are transferred to the next highest choices on their supporters’ ballots. This process of eliminations and transfers continues until a candidate has a majority of votes among ballots that display a preference between the non-eliminated candidates. A basic summary of the relative virtues of these voting methods: Approval Voting is by far the simplest reasonable voting method and it delivers the majority of the benefits of the more complicated ones in electing better leaders. STAR is somewhat better at picking the right winner than Approval and is exceptionally good at incentivizing candidates to care about the opinions of voters in opposing factions. Condorcet methods are comparable to STAR at picking the right winner and are unparalleled at reducing the importance of strategic voting and at incentivizing candidates to endorse one another as a second choice and having it be meaningful. IRV is a significant improvement over Plurality, but elects worse leaders than these other methods, is nearly as bad as Plurality when it comes to third-party visibility, and can mimic the incentives of the partisan primary system. However, IRV has gained the most traction, has b...