The Voting System That Should Replace Every Election

CGP Grey · 4.7M views · 2011-04-07 · 4:27

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Overview

A short CGP Grey explainer on the alternative vote (instant runoff voting) versus first past the post, made around the 2011 UK referendum. It shows how ranked ballots are tallied and why they avoid spoiler effects.

On Hacker News

HN's go-to link whenever ranked-choice voting or voting reform comes up, because it explains the mechanics quickly and entertainingly.

Recommended by 7 HN people across 7 months · HN mentions 2012–2021

Topics

US politics & elections Probability & game theory

What people said

Timothycquinn · 2021-06 · Strong recommendation
GCP Gray has a great series on voting systems. Here is his one on Alternative Voting: [VIDEO] Highly recommend his videos. Funny and informative. Also his Podcast, Hello Internet is awesome.
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rpmisms · 2019-10 · Strong recommendation
I've been a huge fan of this system ever since CGP Grey made an excellent video on how it works and why it's great. Link: [VIDEO]
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hnbad · 2021-07 · Recommendation
> All governments are aristocracies. All states are. Not all systems of government are states. > media manipulations of wide populous The media is owned by the same "aristocracy" that controls the state. In the US and other capitalist countries the aristocracy mostly consists of billionaires and a few political "clans" (usually with ties to "old money"). In the USSR the aristocracy was the Bolshevik intelligentsia and former capitalists that formed the bureaucracy. The problem isn't inherent to humanity, it's inherent to centralized systems. The video you linked actually supports this somewhat: a ruler can't rule alone, they need a staff of advisors and delegates to carry out the ruler's orders. But this is only a problem if you try to have a ruler, or a committee of rulers. The usual counter-argument is that decentralized systems don't work at scale. You can have small communities decide things with direct democracy but clearly that doesn't scale because it's harder to reach consensus the larger the group becomes. To address this I would invite you to read into Democratic Confederalism or watch Anark's aptly-titled video "after the revolution"[0] that explores a very similar anarchist/mutualist governance structure. In most of these scenarios the answer to "direct democracy doesn't scale" is a delegate system and it's easy to mistake this for the same representative democracy we're used to but the important difference is that the delegation is not only proportional but volun
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Sources

Video by CGP Grey, played through YouTube.

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