You might be interested in Levin and Nalebuff (1995) who compared different election systems using British Union election data. "An interesting feature of these British elections is that voters are required to rank the candidates. As a result, knowing the voter ranking, we can simulate elections under a variety of electoral systems. It is perhaps remarkable that among the 30 elections we examined, with the exception of plurality rule and single transferable vote, none of the other seven alternatives considered gave a different top choice (see later section). The systems differed in the rankings of the lower candidates. This empirical regularity suggests a connection to some recent theoretical work (Caplin and Nalebuff, 1988, 1991): when voter preferences are sufficiently similar, a variety of voting systems lead to similar choices, and these choices have desirable properties."
Recently, I've come to appreciate some of the advantages of ranked choice over approval voting (specifically the latter is susceptible to electoral ambushes by small but motivated slivers of the electorate). But we shouldn't lose sight of the empirical data suggesting that anything other than plurality voting will tend to give similar results.
There are many ways to run an election, but doing ranked choice and throwing out people by "fewest first place votes" is just stupid.
Let's say there is a four way election: a democratic socialist, a lefty democrat, a moderate democrat and a republican. If I am a democratic socialist, my actual preference is 1,2,3 and 4. But now I am stuck just like I would have been in first-past-the-post, and I have to consider giving my top pick to the moderate democrat and ranking them 3,2,1 and 4.
Some elected Peltola, and some elected Begich, the Condorcet winner.
I have heard the term "center squeeze" applied to the problem of a candidate who is too closely surrounded by competitors on either side along a left-right axis. It's an interesting question how to reduce the odds of such an outcome.
One outcome that was avoided was the election of a "Condorcet loser," someone who loses to the other major opponents. Palin was such a candidate.
Nice work by you here, and people like Ben Petschel need to be thanked at every opportunity.
But when you say "It's an interesting question how to reduce the odds of such an outcome.", I do not know what is interesting about a problem that is solved by a double nested loop comparing n candidates in n*(n-1)/2 match ups ...
However, I am naively assuming that voters will honestly rank the candidates - and there is currently great incentive NOT to do that.
You might be interested in Levin and Nalebuff (1995) who compared different election systems using British Union election data. "An interesting feature of these British elections is that voters are required to rank the candidates. As a result, knowing the voter ranking, we can simulate elections under a variety of electoral systems. It is perhaps remarkable that among the 30 elections we examined, with the exception of plurality rule and single transferable vote, none of the other seven alternatives considered gave a different top choice (see later section). The systems differed in the rankings of the lower candidates. This empirical regularity suggests a connection to some recent theoretical work (Caplin and Nalebuff, 1988, 1991): when voter preferences are sufficiently similar, a variety of voting systems lead to similar choices, and these choices have desirable properties."
Recently, I've come to appreciate some of the advantages of ranked choice over approval voting (specifically the latter is susceptible to electoral ambushes by small but motivated slivers of the electorate). But we shouldn't lose sight of the empirical data suggesting that anything other than plurality voting will tend to give similar results.
Except the results are now in for Alaska and ... they elected the wrong person.
Begich was, in fact, preferred over both Palin and Peltola - it is right there on the ballots.
But the dummies threw out Begich in the first round and gave the seat to the voters' second choice.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/how-republicans-might-lose-alaska-again-mary-peltola-nick-begich-sarah-palin-ranked-choice-voting-11663191650?st=xnsfpz1dvz0v0wt&reflink=desktopwebshare_permalink
There are many ways to run an election, but doing ranked choice and throwing out people by "fewest first place votes" is just stupid.
Let's say there is a four way election: a democratic socialist, a lefty democrat, a moderate democrat and a republican. If I am a democratic socialist, my actual preference is 1,2,3 and 4. But now I am stuck just like I would have been in first-past-the-post, and I have to consider giving my top pick to the moderate democrat and ranking them 3,2,1 and 4.
I ran those ballots through a script that implements several dozen different ways of tabulating ranked choices. https://www.mathworks.com/matlabcentral/fileexchange/28521-election
Some elected Peltola, and some elected Begich, the Condorcet winner.
I have heard the term "center squeeze" applied to the problem of a candidate who is too closely surrounded by competitors on either side along a left-right axis. It's an interesting question how to reduce the odds of such an outcome.
One outcome that was avoided was the election of a "Condorcet loser," someone who loses to the other major opponents. Palin was such a candidate.
Nice work by you here, and people like Ben Petschel need to be thanked at every opportunity.
But when you say "It's an interesting question how to reduce the odds of such an outcome.", I do not know what is interesting about a problem that is solved by a double nested loop comparing n candidates in n*(n-1)/2 match ups ...
However, I am naively assuming that voters will honestly rank the candidates - and there is currently great incentive NOT to do that.