How would the Approval, IRV, Condorcet, Ranked and Borda voting methods have changed results?
A really interesting article from VOX Media by Dylan Matthews should be a big hit with Democracy Chronicles readers. Titled, “Would a different style of voting have changed the 2016 election? We tested 5 alternatives,” the results are fascinating. Here is a brief excerpt:
We all know who won the presidential election according to the Electoral College: Donald Trump. And we all know who won the presidential election by popular vote: Hillary Clinton. But who would have won if the US used instant runoff voting, a kind of ranked voting system utilized in Australia, Ireland, and San Francisco, and which Maine just voted to adopt for all its elections?
To find out, I teamed up with David Shor, a senior data scientist at Civis Analytics, a Democratic data and polling firm formed by veterans of the 2012 Obama campaign (like Shor). He added a ranking option to a Civis online poll of 1,084 registered voters who report having voted in 2016, conducted on November 15 and 16. The results were then weighted to reflect the election outcome and Civis’s best guess as to the demographics of the 2016 electorate.
Also see our entire section called Voting Methods Central.
Michael Ossipoff says
For the interpretation of polls like the one that the article describes, I’d like to point out that many or most of the Hillary-voters in that poll were “Hold-You-Nose” Hillary voters.
Because our official elections are by Plurality, many voters in polls are voting with Plurality-strategy in mind: They understandably (given their beliefs) want people to support Hillary or Democrats like her in the actual official Plurality elections.
Therefore, regardless, when asked questions about the candidates,, when asked to rate or rank them, those Hold-Your-Nose Democrats will be highly motivated to top-vote Hillary. Not sincerely, but just as part of strategy in the county’s official Plurality elections.
The fact that the questions were (if I understood correctly) could explain why Hold-Your-Nose strategy was so predominant.
In Internet polls, in which wasn’t announced to any particular partisan organization, the Condorcet Winner (the candidate who pairwise-beat everyone else, is usually the Green, or someone like Nader or Bernie.
Michael Ossipoff
Michael Ossipoff