(Some background: I have worked with CES on an unsuccessful effort to get approval voting on the ballot in Denver and wrote a grant request for a campaign in Broomfield. Nowadays I mainly work on voting methods with the League of Women Voters and the Equal Vote Coalition.)
I agree with CES on basically every point mentioned here. However, I believe that it’s possible to have a greater impact in the voting methods area by focusing on voting methods other than approval—specifically, STAR and Condorcet methods. Part of this is because I think these voting methods do a better job than approval at electing optimal winners and incentivizing politicians, but I won’t belabor this point since CES agrees with me about STAR yielding slightly better winners than approval. Also, the difference between approval and the best possible single-winner voting method is smaller than the difference between approval and plurality, or even between approval and IRV (probably). The main reason I think we can have more impact by advocating for STAR or Condorcet is that I believe they are more likely to outcompete IRV nationwide if they are given the level of exposure that approval voting has received.
While approval is a better voting method than IRV, I believe that IRV looks better superficially. Ranking is more expressive than up-or-down approval, and intuitively it seems like a voting method that uses more data will yield better outcomes. Also, the argument that approval voting is vulnerable to strategic bullet voting (voting for only one candidate) gets a lot of traction, and voters don’t like feeling that they need to consider candidate viability or that strategic voting will decide elections. These arguments are flawed and Aaron has linked to some excellent refutations of them, but my point is that they are subtly flawed. Unless you dig into the topic enough to learn about things like the Burlington election, IRV is going to seem like the better option.
Such arguments are a lot easier to rebut when talking about STAR or a Condoret method. Both options are far more expressive than approval voting. Bullet voting is clearly a bad idea in STAR, and it takes a rather convoluted argument to make a case that strategic voting matters at all under Condorcet methods.
CES’s main argument for approval voting over methods like STAR and Condorcet is approval voting’s simplicity. But the simplicity of approval voting has a flip side: it’s also the least sexy of the reasonable voting methods. It’s a whole lot easier to get excited about ranking than about (maybe) approving multiple candidates—approval voting doesn’t feel like as big of a change.
I think sexiness is more valuable than simplicity or ease of implementation when it comes to getting a new voting method adopted. Before Broomfield’s city council debated between approval and IRV, the elections director gave a presentation that portrayed approval as providing basically the same benefits as IRV but at a much lower cost. Not a single council member even mentioned this advantage, and they unanimously went for IRV over approval voting. I expect voters to care even less about implementation costs than city councils. Altogether, approval voting ends up sounding like a cheaper and inferior alternative.
Even if simplicity is important, STAR voting can’t be too complicated to get enacted because IRV isn’t too complicated to get enacted and STAR is simpler than IRV. As for Condorcet, some Condorcet methods are also simpler and easier to implement than IRV. Condorcet methods have a reputation of being complicated enough to be incapable of catching on more broadly, but this reputation is entirely undeserved. As I’ve written here, Condorcet methods are uniquely positioned to take advantage of RCV’s momentum and can be far more acceptable to RCV advocates than approval or STAR.
In the two cities where approval voting is used, Fargo and St. Louis, it wasn’t technically feasible to use IRV. Also, they had some very impressive campaigns; in Fargo, my recollection is that the “Approval Voting Army” was bigger than either the Republican or Democratic campaigns, and St. Louis also had a huge force of volunteers distributing yard signs, sending texts, and doing other kinds of outreach. I think such strong groups of volunteers could have gotten just about any voting method enacted if it was technically feasible and had they opted to pursue it; these ballot measures didn’t succeed because approval voting is uniquely appealing.
Another big point for focusing on other voting methods is that having momentum makes it a lot easier to get a voting method enacted, and this means that there is far greater leverage in advocating for as-yet unused voting methods. If Seattle were to adopt IRV, it would provide a rather minor boost for IRV nationwide. If Seattle adopts approval voting it will be a far bigger deal—but probably not as big a deal as the victory in St. Louis since the difference between “used in Fargo, St. Lous, and Seattle” and “used in Fargo and St. Louis” is smaller than the difference between “used in Fargo and St. Louis” and “used in Fargo”. If Seattle were to adopt STAR or a Condorcet method it would a really big deal for those methods since it would actually put them on the map. The less known a voting method is, the more good we can accomplish by giving it its first victory.
I am not overwhelmingly confident that STAR and Condorcet have a better chance than approval of outcompeting IRV. I believe that it’s quite difficult to predict how well a particular voting method will perform in a statewide ballot measure based on theory and (maybe) a few local results and opinion polls, and CES’s views on the importance of simplicity may be correct. Operating under this uncertainty, I think the best thing we can do is to support all of these better voting methods at once so we succeed both in universes in which approval (but not STAR) can outcompete IRV and in which STAR (but not approval) can outcompete IRV. In addition to funding CES, I think it also makes sense to fund the Equal Vote Coalition. They focus primarily on STAR, but also support approval and Condorcet. I think it’s also important for groups like CES to endorse initiatives to adopt STAR voting when they appear on the ballot and to provide visibility so that local supporters can get involved.
I want to emphasize that I agree with Aaron far more than I disagree with him. While IRV is a real improvement over plurality, it’s still severely flawed and can fall flat on its face when it comes to delivering improvements like decreased polarization and ending the two-party system. I very much hope that approval voting will outcompete IRV; I just don’t think it will.
”Q: I heard there was this thing about approval voting that wasn’t so good or that another voting method was better. Also, don’t forget about Arrow’s Theorem.
A: All voting methods have quirks, but we maintain that the quirks of approval voting are comparatively mild compared to the alternatives. You can see this article where we go into all the details about approval voting critiques. Also, I talked with Kenneth Arrow personally for an hour, and he said that our choose-one voting method was bad. Really.”
I put together a detailed article where I compare different voting methods (including STAR). Some relevant details there are that STAR had its chance on the ballot in the city of Portland and failed. Note that voting methods poll much, much better in cities. So that it failed in Portland where STAR advocates are centered is a particularly discouraging sign. We also find that methods involving scoring (like STAR does) simply do not poll as well. This isn’t that big of a deal because they’re only slightly better in winner selection. And we have other methods that perform very nearly as well (approval voting, in the same cardinal family) that do poll well.
Recall also that approval voting passed by over 60% in both cities it was on the ballot for. I would disagree with the claim that our forces in St. Louis and Fargo were so large that they would have passed any voting method. Our forces were so large in St. Louis and Fargo because it was approval voting. I know because they considered other options. STAR folks even reached out to our key person in Fargo, and they still decided on approval voting. IRV folks reached out to the same folks we partnered with in St. Louis and they still went with approval voting. I feel like to say that our forces were so strong that we could have passed anything misses the causality of why our forces were so strong to begin with.
I also find it a bit hard to take seriously the idea of putting energy behind Condorcet methods. Condorcet methods are a class of ranking methods that elect a “beat-all” or Condorcet winner. The math involved to select the winner when there is no Condorcet winner is quite complex (more so than STAR or IRV). That alone seems like a large barrier. Even I have to look up the algorithms to remember how they’re computed. And there’s no doing these by hand.
I feel like those two rationales help to explain why we continue to get behind approval rather than splitting our focus.
It’s also worth noting that CES explored the possibility of approval voting in Denver and to a lesser extent in Broomfield. We did this by talking with the Denver city council who invited us and talking with advocates in Colorado. We did not support signature gathering in Denver, and we did not submit it to be on the ballot (though there was an individual who did it on their own and abandoned it). We did not think that we had an adequate team of people who physically lived in Denver during the window that we were focused on. And so we decided to look at other opportunities. We’re data-oriented and cautious about how we spend limited resources. These are hard decisions, but saying no to Denver also meant that we got to say yes to our partners in Seattle. Seattle is polling at 70% and we have great partners who live there.
Also, the question is not whether approval voting will outcompete IRV—though with proper funding it very well may. The bar is actually lower. Perhaps a better rephrasing of the question is whether approval voting can thrive as a candidate and be implemented so that it may be tested alongside IRV. And to that question, I’m confident that it can. We’ve evidenced that. And we will surely get more cities with proper funding. And we are currently exploring our plans with states. I can’t say exactly where we’re targeting and when just yet (we have to keep some aspects of our strategy confidential). But we will target states as our strategic opportunities align with our operational capacity—which is determined by funding.
Consider also that there are only two states that use IRV. Both won by slim margins. One of those states (Alaska) failed the first time it tried. IRV also failed by 10 points in Massachusetts. And it’s been repealed by voters multiple times in cities across the US. This is not a runaway for IRV. And it took them multiple decades to get this far. There’s enough reason for concern that it’s worth supporting approval voting as a viable alternative—particularly given that approval voting does substantially better at its job as a voting method.
Plus our team at CES that is pushing approval voting is amazing. I feel very lucky to work with such talented staff. Each of them went through a very challenging blind hiring process, and now they get to continually flex their muscles at work. We’re really just starting to show what we’re capable of.
I fully agree with CES’s decision not to commit any more resources in Denver or Broomfield. I also agree that “approval voting can thrive as a candidate and be implemented so that it may be tested alongside IRV”, though I expect that most of this thriving will occur in places like Fargo where technical challenges prevent the implementation of IRV (or even STAR).
However, it’s far too soon to dismiss the chances of STAR voting catching on. Getting it adopted in the first city will be the hardest since it doesn’t have much of a track record. Portland didn’t actually get to vote on it (they failed to get it onto the ballot due to a lack of funds), and the election where it was rejected occurred in Lane County, OR, where it still got 47.6% of the vote. Had they only tried to get STAR voting in the city of Eugene (the largest city in Lane County) they would have almost certainly succeeded; as you noted, “voting methods poll much, much better in cities”, and it received over 70% of the vote where STAR advocates had done most of their campaigning (mainly in Eugene). Subsequent efforts to get STAR voting on the ballot in Eugene have been stymied by the pandemic and by some of the signatures they collected being wrongly rejected, but it’s going to happen sooner or later and STAR voting is highly likely to pass when it does.
I don’t blame you for dismissing Condorcet though; I’m in a very small minority in viewing it as politically viable and I don’t know of anyone else who has written about why it can catch on.
(Some background: I have worked with CES on an unsuccessful effort to get approval voting on the ballot in Denver and wrote a grant request for a campaign in Broomfield. Nowadays I mainly work on voting methods with the League of Women Voters and the Equal Vote Coalition.)
I agree with CES on basically every point mentioned here. However, I believe that it’s possible to have a greater impact in the voting methods area by focusing on voting methods other than approval—specifically, STAR and Condorcet methods. Part of this is because I think these voting methods do a better job than approval at electing optimal winners and incentivizing politicians, but I won’t belabor this point since CES agrees with me about STAR yielding slightly better winners than approval. Also, the difference between approval and the best possible single-winner voting method is smaller than the difference between approval and plurality, or even between approval and IRV (probably). The main reason I think we can have more impact by advocating for STAR or Condorcet is that I believe they are more likely to outcompete IRV nationwide if they are given the level of exposure that approval voting has received.
While approval is a better voting method than IRV, I believe that IRV looks better superficially. Ranking is more expressive than up-or-down approval, and intuitively it seems like a voting method that uses more data will yield better outcomes. Also, the argument that approval voting is vulnerable to strategic bullet voting (voting for only one candidate) gets a lot of traction, and voters don’t like feeling that they need to consider candidate viability or that strategic voting will decide elections. These arguments are flawed and Aaron has linked to some excellent refutations of them, but my point is that they are subtly flawed. Unless you dig into the topic enough to learn about things like the Burlington election, IRV is going to seem like the better option.
Such arguments are a lot easier to rebut when talking about STAR or a Condoret method. Both options are far more expressive than approval voting. Bullet voting is clearly a bad idea in STAR, and it takes a rather convoluted argument to make a case that strategic voting matters at all under Condorcet methods.
CES’s main argument for approval voting over methods like STAR and Condorcet is approval voting’s simplicity. But the simplicity of approval voting has a flip side: it’s also the least sexy of the reasonable voting methods. It’s a whole lot easier to get excited about ranking than about (maybe) approving multiple candidates—approval voting doesn’t feel like as big of a change.
I think sexiness is more valuable than simplicity or ease of implementation when it comes to getting a new voting method adopted. Before Broomfield’s city council debated between approval and IRV, the elections director gave a presentation that portrayed approval as providing basically the same benefits as IRV but at a much lower cost. Not a single council member even mentioned this advantage, and they unanimously went for IRV over approval voting. I expect voters to care even less about implementation costs than city councils. Altogether, approval voting ends up sounding like a cheaper and inferior alternative.
Even if simplicity is important, STAR voting can’t be too complicated to get enacted because IRV isn’t too complicated to get enacted and STAR is simpler than IRV. As for Condorcet, some Condorcet methods are also simpler and easier to implement than IRV. Condorcet methods have a reputation of being complicated enough to be incapable of catching on more broadly, but this reputation is entirely undeserved. As I’ve written here, Condorcet methods are uniquely positioned to take advantage of RCV’s momentum and can be far more acceptable to RCV advocates than approval or STAR.
In the two cities where approval voting is used, Fargo and St. Louis, it wasn’t technically feasible to use IRV. Also, they had some very impressive campaigns; in Fargo, my recollection is that the “Approval Voting Army” was bigger than either the Republican or Democratic campaigns, and St. Louis also had a huge force of volunteers distributing yard signs, sending texts, and doing other kinds of outreach. I think such strong groups of volunteers could have gotten just about any voting method enacted if it was technically feasible and had they opted to pursue it; these ballot measures didn’t succeed because approval voting is uniquely appealing.
Another big point for focusing on other voting methods is that having momentum makes it a lot easier to get a voting method enacted, and this means that there is far greater leverage in advocating for as-yet unused voting methods. If Seattle were to adopt IRV, it would provide a rather minor boost for IRV nationwide. If Seattle adopts approval voting it will be a far bigger deal—but probably not as big a deal as the victory in St. Louis since the difference between “used in Fargo, St. Lous, and Seattle” and “used in Fargo and St. Louis” is smaller than the difference between “used in Fargo and St. Louis” and “used in Fargo”. If Seattle were to adopt STAR or a Condorcet method it would a really big deal for those methods since it would actually put them on the map. The less known a voting method is, the more good we can accomplish by giving it its first victory.
I am not overwhelmingly confident that STAR and Condorcet have a better chance than approval of outcompeting IRV. I believe that it’s quite difficult to predict how well a particular voting method will perform in a statewide ballot measure based on theory and (maybe) a few local results and opinion polls, and CES’s views on the importance of simplicity may be correct. Operating under this uncertainty, I think the best thing we can do is to support all of these better voting methods at once so we succeed both in universes in which approval (but not STAR) can outcompete IRV and in which STAR (but not approval) can outcompete IRV. In addition to funding CES, I think it also makes sense to fund the Equal Vote Coalition. They focus primarily on STAR, but also support approval and Condorcet. I think it’s also important for groups like CES to endorse initiatives to adopt STAR voting when they appear on the ballot and to provide visibility so that local supporters can get involved.
I want to emphasize that I agree with Aaron far more than I disagree with him. While IRV is a real improvement over plurality, it’s still severely flawed and can fall flat on its face when it comes to delivering improvements like decreased polarization and ending the two-party system. I very much hope that approval voting will outcompete IRV; I just don’t think it will.
I feel like this comment falls in this category:
”Q: I heard there was this thing about approval voting that wasn’t so good or that another voting method was better. Also, don’t forget about Arrow’s Theorem.
A: All voting methods have quirks, but we maintain that the quirks of approval voting are comparatively mild compared to the alternatives. You can see this article where we go into all the details about approval voting critiques. Also, I talked with Kenneth Arrow personally for an hour, and he said that our choose-one voting method was bad. Really.”
I put together a detailed article where I compare different voting methods (including STAR). Some relevant details there are that STAR had its chance on the ballot in the city of Portland and failed. Note that voting methods poll much, much better in cities. So that it failed in Portland where STAR advocates are centered is a particularly discouraging sign. We also find that methods involving scoring (like STAR does) simply do not poll as well. This isn’t that big of a deal because they’re only slightly better in winner selection. And we have other methods that perform very nearly as well (approval voting, in the same cardinal family) that do poll well.
Recall also that approval voting passed by over 60% in both cities it was on the ballot for. I would disagree with the claim that our forces in St. Louis and Fargo were so large that they would have passed any voting method. Our forces were so large in St. Louis and Fargo because it was approval voting. I know because they considered other options. STAR folks even reached out to our key person in Fargo, and they still decided on approval voting. IRV folks reached out to the same folks we partnered with in St. Louis and they still went with approval voting. I feel like to say that our forces were so strong that we could have passed anything misses the causality of why our forces were so strong to begin with.
I also find it a bit hard to take seriously the idea of putting energy behind Condorcet methods. Condorcet methods are a class of ranking methods that elect a “beat-all” or Condorcet winner. The math involved to select the winner when there is no Condorcet winner is quite complex (more so than STAR or IRV). That alone seems like a large barrier. Even I have to look up the algorithms to remember how they’re computed. And there’s no doing these by hand.
I feel like those two rationales help to explain why we continue to get behind approval rather than splitting our focus.
It’s also worth noting that CES explored the possibility of approval voting in Denver and to a lesser extent in Broomfield. We did this by talking with the Denver city council who invited us and talking with advocates in Colorado. We did not support signature gathering in Denver, and we did not submit it to be on the ballot (though there was an individual who did it on their own and abandoned it). We did not think that we had an adequate team of people who physically lived in Denver during the window that we were focused on. And so we decided to look at other opportunities. We’re data-oriented and cautious about how we spend limited resources. These are hard decisions, but saying no to Denver also meant that we got to say yes to our partners in Seattle. Seattle is polling at 70% and we have great partners who live there.
Also, the question is not whether approval voting will outcompete IRV—though with proper funding it very well may. The bar is actually lower. Perhaps a better rephrasing of the question is whether approval voting can thrive as a candidate and be implemented so that it may be tested alongside IRV. And to that question, I’m confident that it can. We’ve evidenced that. And we will surely get more cities with proper funding. And we are currently exploring our plans with states. I can’t say exactly where we’re targeting and when just yet (we have to keep some aspects of our strategy confidential). But we will target states as our strategic opportunities align with our operational capacity—which is determined by funding.
Consider also that there are only two states that use IRV. Both won by slim margins. One of those states (Alaska) failed the first time it tried. IRV also failed by 10 points in Massachusetts. And it’s been repealed by voters multiple times in cities across the US. This is not a runaway for IRV. And it took them multiple decades to get this far. There’s enough reason for concern that it’s worth supporting approval voting as a viable alternative—particularly given that approval voting does substantially better at its job as a voting method.
Plus our team at CES that is pushing approval voting is amazing. I feel very lucky to work with such talented staff. Each of them went through a very challenging blind hiring process, and now they get to continually flex their muscles at work. We’re really just starting to show what we’re capable of.
I fully agree with CES’s decision not to commit any more resources in Denver or Broomfield. I also agree that “approval voting can thrive as a candidate and be implemented so that it may be tested alongside IRV”, though I expect that most of this thriving will occur in places like Fargo where technical challenges prevent the implementation of IRV (or even STAR).
However, it’s far too soon to dismiss the chances of STAR voting catching on. Getting it adopted in the first city will be the hardest since it doesn’t have much of a track record. Portland didn’t actually get to vote on it (they failed to get it onto the ballot due to a lack of funds), and the election where it was rejected occurred in Lane County, OR, where it still got 47.6% of the vote. Had they only tried to get STAR voting in the city of Eugene (the largest city in Lane County) they would have almost certainly succeeded; as you noted, “voting methods poll much, much better in cities”, and it received over 70% of the vote where STAR advocates had done most of their campaigning (mainly in Eugene). Subsequent efforts to get STAR voting on the ballot in Eugene have been stymied by the pandemic and by some of the signatures they collected being wrongly rejected, but it’s going to happen sooner or later and STAR voting is highly likely to pass when it does.
I don’t blame you for dismissing Condorcet though; I’m in a very small minority in viewing it as politically viable and I don’t know of anyone else who has written about why it can catch on.