Which of these options are you favorites? Rank up to 5 options:
https://www.rcv123.org/ballot/9T1G8AJZDeRPZiWJwWaKsB
You may also answer and discuss here, but only the votes in the link is counted for the purposes of this survey.
Why am I doing this? Because I missed the polls from [the website that shall not be named], so I wanted to experiment a bit here. And what better way to do polls than the best way! I hereby present you to the Ranked Choice Ballot! Ta-da! (Please go vote, I spent a lot of time on this)
Edit: If you don’t want to vote, here are the results from all the votes so far:
Having two different smoothies but lumping together every single alcoholic beverage is certainly a survey design… choice.
Also two colas but only one non-cola soda. That should’ve been categories like “lemon-lime soda,” “orange soda,” “cola,” “root beer,” etc.
I don’t know every type of alcohol so I’ll just put them together. I never consumed any alcoholic beverages in my entire life. I don’t think I ever could due to my deteriorating health.
‘any alcoholic beverage’ is quite a lumpy category.
and and then a few specific sodas are listed but no generic? seems like it should be cola flavored sodar, citrus flavored soda, other flavored soda or something.
A more typical breakdown would be beer/wine/spirits, possibly with a separation between spirits alone vs. cocktails.
IKR? You can have any alcohol but our choices of soda are just coke and orange fanta? 😩
For being so specific, is missing a lot of options. MtDew, rockstar/monster/red bull, squirt/fresca, etc.
I think it should be more generalized, like orange soda, cola, etc, or just sodas, energy drinks, etc.
Sweet tea!
The order is not the same, but my 5 choices match the top 5. Now I’m sad. Mainstream and sad.
Ranked choice is probably the worst option for a poll like this…
I’m betting if you ran this exact poll under different rules, say multiple choice allowing unlimited selection, you’d get a vastly different answer.
This is because Ranked Choice is a horrible voting system. If First Past the Post wasn’t so bad, RCV would have the title of worst system ever created.
Hell, the site you linked even has a “pros and cons” section where they even admit to the massive problems with the system but then hand wave them away.
Ballot exhaustion alone is a showstopper. They pretend that the voter “just didn’t choose someone popular enough to win” when the reality is much more insidious. The most common form of ballot exhaustion is when your 2nd or 3rd choice is eliminated in the first round, and then your 1st choice is eliminated in a later round.
And because of how votes are counted, if you had put your 2nd choice in the 1st slot, they could have won the election, even if they were not your literal favorite.
Up to 20% of ballots cast in RCV elections are thrown out due to ballot exhaustion. That’s enough votes to massively shift who wins or loses.
The basic truth here is that RCV is good at one thing. Preventing fringe candidates from spoiling an election between two front-runners. It can prevent another Bush v Gore, but that’s it.
Also, in real world use, it’s fucked up several elections.
Due to the need for centralized counting, the 2021 NYC mayoral race had 130,000 extra votes that turned out to have been test ballots that should never have been in the same location as the actual election ballots.
https://www.thecity.nyc/2021/6/29/22556830/nyc-board-of-election-pulls-preliminary-mayoral-results
Centralize counting and an overly complex system also resulted in the wrong winner being chosen in California. The wrong winner was sworn in and served in the position for a full month before the error was found.
https://www.sfchronicle.com/bayarea/article/Alameda-County-admits-tallying-error-in-17682520.php
There are vastly better options than RCV.
You can read up on them here. https://www.starvoting.org/
And here, https://electionscience.org/
I’m trying to figure out the pros and cons of the STAR Voting method versus the pros and cons of the STV method. Can anyone help fill me in?
Do you have 3 hours?
This live stream explains it all.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O-dzK3YIAf8
The TLDR, or TLDW here;
The difference between RCV (also called IRV) and STAR is the difference between an Ordinal system and a Cardinal system.
An Ordinal system is a ranked system. Chose one or the other, but never both. A vote for A means you cannot also support B. This lead to some math shit that actually gives preferential treatment to two party systems.
RCV claims to support third parties and solve the spoiler effect. The truth is the opposite in every way. It eliminates fringe parties that would spoil elections, but also falls prey to spoiler effects when you have very similar candidates. It’s actually a mess.
STAR on the other hand is a Cardinal voting system. A vote for A is a vote for A and a Vote for B has no impact on A. A good example is saying that I give Chocolate Milkshakes 5 out of 5 stars and New Coke 1 out of 5. But here’s the main difference to an Ordinal system, I can also give a Banana Smoothies 5 out of 5 stars. Because I’m rating them as individuals, not in comparison to each other.
STAR is literally a 5-star review of the candidates, and the two with the highest average (or just highest scores) are then put head to head. Each ballot is then looked at, if Chocolate Milkshakes are rated higher on any given ballot than Banana Smoothies, Milkshakes get the vote of that person. If they’re the same, a vote of No Preference is logged, and the No Preference votes are also made public at the end.
No no, I was asking about the differences between Single Transferable Vote and STAR - not RCV/IRV.
RCV is the single winner version of STV.
Every single fault of RCV is present in STV, but because it’s a multi-winner format, the complexity and lack of transparency in the counting process are far worse.
If you really want proportional or multi-winner elections, then a better option is this.
It’s based off of Score the same way that STAR is, but tweaked to be multi-winner.
Ah, okay - thanks for the explanation.
I do like the idea of multi-winner elections because of the increased chance of having a representative for your specific issues taken to a national assembly. In the UK things are split up into boroughs, which seems illogical for cities and aside from being grandfathered in likely only persists because it enables gerrymandering.
So if you were to choose the best system for multi-candidate voting that would work for most real-life elections or multiple-choice rankings, which one would it be?
Absolute best would be STAR.
A good runner-up would be Approval.
Thanks for the links. I’ve heard of star, but approval is new to me. I’ll read up on those
Approval is super easy and can be used at small scale, and at large scale too.
But here it is in less than 2 minutes.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=orybDrUj4vA
Doing it at large scale, is just scaling it up. And the great thing is, it easily handles as many options as you throw at it.
Here is an alternative Piped link(s): https://piped.video/watch?v=orybDrUj4vA
https://piped.video/watch?v=orybDrUj4vA
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I’m open-source, check me out at GitHub.
No horchata? :(
Que rico!
Lemmynade
/dadjoke
Im a fan of energy drinks. I think you should have categorised the soft drinks into one category. There’s a lot more to be included.
You forgot about soda water
Yep give me any flavored sparkly water and that would be mine
Milk but no “non-dairy milk” option?
Non dairy milk is still milk for the purposes of this poll.
(I didn’t even know there was such a thing, sorry for my ignorance.)
Out of curiousity, where do you live? Alternative milks (like oat-milk, soy-milk, almond-milk, etc) have become very popular the past few years.
Oh shit I knew I was missing something. How could I forget soy milk lol. It’s hard to think with depression…
Edit: USA
Pretty sure it’s not actually milk when plant based. Like, there’s wheat extract, which tastes pretty much identical to skimmed milk and can be used as a substitute, but (as far as I’m aware) you can’t advertise it as milk in the EU.
Which, and I’m sorry, brings me to one of my pet peeves. Don’t label plant alternatives as “vegan meat”. It’s either vegan or meat/diary, not both! What’s even the point in making fake meat? To have some chum accidentally buy fake meat, only to find out and become annoyed and resistant towards plant based alternatives?
Make frigging original ideas. Like “wheat chocolate” where people have no preconceptions, instead of “non-milk milk chocolate that totally tastes the same as real milk chocolate, we swear you won’t be disappointed!”. And then you taste it, and it’s just barely off. It doesn’t taste bad, but it’s not what you expected when you though about milk, so you become disappointed and avoid other really good tasting alternatives which might have stood a chance if not being directly compared to an already established market standard and favorite.
And yes, that chum might just be me, and although I’ve been presented with some really good tasting alternatives that I’ve come to love, I still absolutely refuse to buy/try any “Vegan meats/diaries”.
Would much rather just have some ratatouille, grilled mushroom, or wheat chocolate instead.
Rant over.
Counter Rant
I don’t understand the insistence in the western Anglophone world that milk automatically means cow’s milk.
Coconut milk is a very normal word to say in my mother tongue (Bengali). What else are you even supposed to call it? Coconut “beverage” or “liquid” would be hella confusing because we wouldn’t know if one means the milk (the creamy liquid that comes from pressing the coconut pulp) or the water (the transparent liquid that resides in the pulp, and tastes and behaves completely differently). Are we supposed to go invent a new word every time we encounter a milky liquid?
Also, what about other mammalian milks? Do we need to invent a new name for goat milk? (Which is a fairly common drink in India, possibly thanks to Gandhi’s obsession with the stuff) What about sheep milk (not very common in India, but widely used in some parts of Europe). Or Yak’s Milk? (Pretty popular in specific pockets of India).
Milk is any white creamy liquid. That’s how it has always been used, in English and in other languages, going back centuries. The cow agriculture industry must have mounted one hell of a PR campaign to convince western consumes that milk automatically implies it must come from a cow. In India, you just look at the packaging. Does it have a picture of a cow on it? Well then it comes from a cow. Does it have a coconut on it? You guessed it, it comes from a coconut. Simple. I don’t see how that can ever be confusing to customers.
Rant over
Almond milk has quite a long history of being called as such: https://historydollop.com/2016/11/09/almond-milk-the-medieval-way/
Thank you for pointing that out. Yet, in a world where refrigerators are commonplace, and where the grip of the church has lessened, the term “milk” has come to be almost exclusively used for diary. So much in fact, that many find it misleading to use it to describe non-diary products.
Milk is one of the many words which have changed their definition over the past millenia, albeit, not as drastically as many other words. And we might come to a point where no one uses diary milk, or where milk once again also covers almonds, but this is not yet it, at least not in the EU. And to use it to cover both anyway, will likely push a lot of people away from more plant based alternatives.
If it wasn’t specific sodas and instead generics like cola vs root beer vs fruity flavored, I would have voted for a soda over an alcoholic beverage.
It’s too hard to compare water, flavored drinks, and smoothies. Those are all different things
Milk, milk tea, and 2 different smoothies, but no milkshakes? Bah!
I enjoy a good old fashioned chocolate malt.
