ranked choice voting

Not a Ranked-Choice Failure

Zachary Bartsch3 Comments

I have a good friend who is a professor in philosophy at another university. He was telling me about the struggle among his colleagues to determine the recipient of their annual department award. Every year the department chooses from among the graduating philosophy major students one to recognize for excellence. This year, they faced the challenge of incommensurables.

One student had a high GPA in the major, but had a severe case of senioritis and had phoned-in her senior courses. A second had a slightly worse GPA, but had face-planted the senior thesis. Still a 3rd student had merely a good GPA, but wrote an excellent publishable thesis.

The philosophy faculty could not agree. They each shared stories and arguments about the relative weights of the performance indicators and the relative value of the performances. I don’t know if you know any academics, but suffice it to say that they both A) tend not to be good administrators and B) tend not to be invited to productive meetings. I’m glad that I wasn’t in the room.

In fact, the faculty met twice! They were at an impasse. The department award winner is usually no contest. The person who excels in one area tends to also excel in the others. This year, the decision was so unclear and the faculty were so divided that they even seriously considered withholding the award entirely. None of the candidates was excellent on all counts.

Finally, trying to come to a decision – if not an agreement – they decided to adopt something that they’d heard good things about: Ranked Choice Voting. I was thrilled to hear this. What an opportunity to exhibit the nuance and beauty of this collective choice method! They agreed to adopt whatever the outcome would be. As my friend told me this, I was giddy with anticipation. What an exciting story! More good experiences with ranked choice voting may improve its popularity and make widespread its adoption.

If you don’t know, Ranked Choice Voting involves everyone ranking the candidates in order of preference. In this case 1 is most preferred and 3 is least preferred. Then, the candidate with the fewest first-ranked votes is eliminated from the running. The voters whose first preference was nixed now have their votes reallocated to their 2nd preferred candidates. Since only two candidates remain, one of them has won the majority and the election ends with an outcome that is usually considered better than the simple ‘just choose your favorite’ version that most of us use at our local polls.

How did the philosophers fare?

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Predicting the NYC Mayoral Race

James BaileyLeave a comment

Yesterday, co-blogger Jeremy asked “Should Andrew Yang Wait To Concede?” in the New York City mayoral race. He argued that while Yang finished 4th in 1st-place primary votes, the new Ranked Choice Voting system meant he could still win. This is of course true in theory- but today I argue it is very unlikely in practice.

I say this not because I have scrutinized all the polls to predict the exact distribution of 2nd- and 3rd-place votes, or because I think I know more than Jeremy about political science or New York. Instead, any time I’m wondering about whether something will happen and I don’t have a strong opinion based on my own knowledge, I simply check what markets have to say. In this case, there are prediction markets bearing on this exact issue. The odds from PredictIt, shown below, have Adams (who finished with the most 1st-place votes, 32%) as the heavy favorite, with Yang reduced to an approximately 1% chance of winning.

But Jeremy is right to highlight that the Ranked-Choice system makes it less obvious who will win. You can see PredictIt traders still think that Garcia, who finished with 19% of 1st-place votes, is substantially more likely to win than Wiley, who finished with 22% (though the new system didn’t matter in the Republican primary, where Sliwa won with a clear majority of 1st-place votes).

Crypto-based betting platform Polymarket has actually closed their market for Yang already, declaring that he lost, though they agree with PredictIt that the overall election isn’t over and that Garcia still has a real chance despite coming in 3rd for 1st-place votes.

Of course, prediction markets aren’t perfect- they are certainly less accurate (easier to beat) than the stock market, as my track record of betting in both shows. But they make for a great first approximation on subjects you don’t know well, and if you think you do know better, they offer you the chance to make money and to make the odds more accurate. If you think Yang will still win, you can go bet on PredictIt and potentially 100x your money. Or if you think this ranked choice stuff is nonsense and Adams obviously won, you can pick up an easy 10% return. Or if you’re like me in this case, you can stay out of it, take a quick glance at the markets, and get a good idea of what is likely to happen without having to read the news or the pundits.

Should Andrew Yang Wait to Concede?

Jeremy HorpedahlLeave a comment

Yesterday New York City held their mayoral primary elections. This was an exciting event for election system nerds (political scientists and public choice economists) because NYC is now using a form of ranked choice voting to determine the winner.

While this is not the first place in the US to use RCV (Maine, Alaska, and a handful of cities use it), it is still notable for a few reasons. First, this is America’s largest city. Second, there are a lot of viable candidates, which makes RCV especially interesting and useful.

Specifically, NYC is using a form of voting called instant runoff. There are currently 13 candidates, and voters indicate their top 5 in order. If no one has a majority (>50%) of the votes, then the rankings entered by voters come into play. And indeed that is what happened yesterday.

On the first round, only counting first place votes, Andrew Yang came in 4th with just under 12% of the votes. So last night he conceded.

But should Yang have conceded? Maybe not! Let’s explore how instant runoff works.

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