Instant runoff voting is the system we need - <AUTHOR> http://chuckgreenman.posthaven.com/instant-runoff-voting-is-the-system-we-need <comment><USER2> I'm continually upset and confused by Instant runoff voting's popularity. IRV is, by my reckoning, a much inferior (and more complicated) system than other systems, like range voting or ranked pairs. And it has some bizarre properties that make me wonder if it is even worse than the traditional first-past-the- post.

One property of IRV that makes it so questionable is its non-monotonicity. This means that you can help a candidate by ranking them lower, and hurt a candidate by ranking them higher. It is extremely easy to visualize how ill- behaved IRV is in the charts on this website:

[http://zesty.ca/voting/sim/](http://zesty.ca/voting/sim/)

Meanwhile, ranked pairs (a "condorcet" method) has the property that, if candidate A is more popular than all other candidates pairwise, then candidate A will always win. This is _not_ true in IRV.

If you're interested in falling down the rabbit hole of electoral systems, I recommend looking at this chart that compares their properties:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_electoral_system...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_electoral_systems#Comparisons)

<comment><USER3> Runoffs are something people understand, IRV is conceptually similar and makes intuitive sense to people, it's very easy to explain to people, 'if nobody gets a majority, eliminate last place and redistribute their votes, repeat'.

Compare that to to some of the other systems which often have complex mathematical descriptions which are hard for people to wrap their heads around.

Another thing is how big a deal is 'non-monotonicity' is it actually going to be something that will affect elections all the time, or is it something that's more minor than say turnout which honestly has no solution and on one side you have USA where turnout is low so the game is all about making sure your base turns out, or on the other side you have Australia where voting is mandatory so making sure people who don't care, don't vote at random is a big part of the game.

<comment><USER4> IRV is more complex in every way than STAR voting.

STAR is just score with a _single_ automatic runoff. It gets everything you are talking about in terms of intuition, explanation… everything you like about IRV is present in STAR and basically everything wrong with IRV is fixed by STAR.

<comment><USER5> IRV has problems, but complexity, intuition, and explanation are not three of them.

Intuiting what "giving one star more or less to a candidate" means is really difficult to understand as a voter. "If more voters had given Kodos four stars instead of three, he could have won" is a headache inducing explanation.

Approval voting is the only alternative to IRV or plurality voting that seems to match the level of intuitiveness of both the voting process and the tabulation process.

<comment><USER4> I seriously doubt that anyone would get a headache over "if people had given that losing candidate _higher_ scores, they would have won". I don't even see how you can honestly claim that to be anything but completely intuitive to everyone.

If IRV complexity and explanations were not a problem, we wouldn't see today's reality where IRV proponents themselves _constantly_ make incorrect claims about it.

Not always (and not in the linked article here), but often people get the _intuition_ that their 2nd choice will get counted when their 1st choice is eliminated, and then try to get them to understand why their 2nd choice was _not_ counted (because their 2nd choice had already been eliminated) while someone else's 2nd choice _was_ counted…

What happened in Burlington before they repealled IRV shows not only people getting intuitions about IRV wrong but people often don't even get what happened in Burlington because it seems so counter-intuitive. [https://www.equal.vote/Burlington](https://www.equal.vote/Burlington)

And yet, that scenario is common enough. Burlington is just the case where all the ballot stats were released so we can study it.

<comment><USER6> That Burlington result just doesn't look clearly wrong to me.

With FPTP voting, C would have won of the three candidates, and A would have placed last. If you removed A from the race, B would have won - and did!

Alternate voting systems are supposed to produce different results from plurality voting, and that's often unsettling the first time it happens.

That page makes the claim that IRV produced a bad result and that's why it was replaced. But at least the candidate with the 2nd-most 1st place votes won. If instead the Condorcet winner, A, had won, do they really think it would have been better? A got the _least_ 1st place votes of the three, who's to say there wouldn't have been an even larger backlash?

<comment><USER4> If you don't see what's wrong with the Burlington result, it just proves how hard it is for people to understand IRV.

FPTP is even _worse_ than IRV, except that people _know_ how it is bad so they adapt accordingly.

Of course, it's speculation about the specific backlash, but the core issue in IRV is this (and it happens in the Burlington case):

ALL the voters whose 1st choice _loses_ in the final round _never_ get any of their other preferences counted _and_ they lose their 1st choice. They get NOTHING, no say, totally screwed. They could be as much as 49% of voters. Now, WITHIN IRV, they can later learn (as people have learned about strategy in FPTP) that if they _betray_ their favorite and vote for their lesser-evil choice as 1st, then they WILL swing the election to their lesser-evil instead of the greater evil.

By ignoring the preferences of some voters and counting others, the weighting is unequal and people _will_ feel disenfranchised.

Maybe this older more thorough discussion of the Burlington case will help you understand: [https://www.rangevoting.org/Burlington.html](https://www.rangevoting.org/Burlington.html)

The _core_ point is that voters in IRV can get a preferable outcome via __favorite betrayal __(a dishonest strategy). Either they _do_ use that strategy and we're back to the lesser-evil problems we have now, or they don't use that strategy and we're back to vote-splitting like we have now, where a candidate choosing to run can both lose and cause a _worse_ outcome for their supporters.

<comment><USER7> > ALL the voters whose 1st choice loses in the final round never get any of > their other preferences counted and they lose their 1st choice. They get > NOTHING, no say, totally screwed. They could be as much as 49% of voters. > Now, WITHIN IRV, they can later learn (as people have learned about strategy > in FPTP) that if they betray their favorite and vote for their lesser-evil > choice as 1st, then they WILL swing the election to their lesser-evil > instead of the greater evil.

Another way of seeing this could be that such voters had their 1st choice considered and given value all the way until the last round, whereas many other voters had their lesser choices considered in their previous rounds. The 1rst-choicers-all-the-way-till-the-end could be considered more favored than the latter voters I mentioned, who lost their favorite candidates earlier on in the process.

I'm not saying that this is a better interpretation of the situation you posit. I'm just using it to illustrate that it's hard, maybe impossible, to get away from subjective criteria when we consider the virtues of various voting systems.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Maine voted on using this system for some elections in 2016.

It passed, but -- perhaps not surprisingly -- many current, established politicians weren't happy. Maine's governor called it "the most horrific thing in the world" and the state legislature refused to fund implementation and voted to delay it until 2022.

So this year the the citizens of Maine voted _again_ to confirm instant runoff voting, overruling the state legislature and vetoing their delay. It passed by an even bigger margin this time.

[https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2018/06/maine-l...](https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2018/06/maine- lepage-ranked-choice-voting/562871/)

<comment><USER9> When will it come into effect? Article doesn't seem to say.

<comment><USER8> They used it in June for a statewide race and they're using it today for the federal congressional races.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Sadly, voting terminology is nasty. I've long advocated for a better voting system than first-past-the-post (or "pick one", as I call it for non-voting- system nerds). IRV has issues and is not my first choice, but it is better than FPTP. That said, the major objection I get from people is "anything else is too hard".

So I say "can you list your choices in order of preference?" They almost always say that's acceptable. You can run IRV from that, but you can also run most any Condorcet variant. The only remaining part is to show the results in a fashion people understand, which is non-trivial but is also not what the "anything else is too hard" group was complaining about.

So don't say "ranked pair" or "STV"...say "order of preference", and you'll find people more willing to consider ideas. It's not EASY, but it's definitely EASIER.

<comment><USER11> _it is better than FPTP._

We use FPTP in the UK because it directly correlates an MP with a constituency. Even if the candidate you didn't prefer wins, they are still _your MP_ and have a duty to represent you.

We had a referendum on PR a few years ago (which was rejected) and its proponents kept banging on about it, then went _very very quiet_ when UKIP got 4 million votes (more than the SNP and the Greens combined).

<comment><USER10> FPTP is not the only system to do that - if the vote is to decide who represents _you_, any system can do that. If the vote is instead to give the party a certain amount of power, it won't do as you want regardless of the voting system.

<comment><USER11> The people vote for their representatives directly, and the party with the most has the opportunity but not the obligation to form the government. The alternative, PR, breaks the link between constituency and representative. That's why very few wanted it - generally those who thought it would favour their party (Lib Dems) who are unable to muster much support at the local level.

<comment><USER12> I assume that PR means proportional representation. Instant runoff voting does not necessitate proportional representation. You can have an instant-runoff vote to elect a single MP for your constituency. All you do is rank the candidates in order of preference rather than picking just one of them. There will be one winner, and that's your MP.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Why not approval voting? It's much easier to explain to people and is way more compatible with the current system. You simply approve of any number of candidates, and the candidate with the highest number of approvals wins. Maybe in practice people would only ever approve one candidate and the situation wouldn't change, but I think it's a least a good small step forward.

<comment><USER14> #1 - I switched from advocating IRV to approval voting once I better understood the election integrity aspects. Tabulating IRV is much harder, necessitating more software, which obfuscates the process.

#2 - Election administrators hate IRV. They'll oppose, sabotage it at every turn. We had a local trial run. As an observer, it'd be hard to argue the admins made an honest effort to make it succeed.

#3 - IRV is confusing to voters. Try explaining it to your parents.

Any changes to our voting systems should be incremental, deliberate. First with local races and then progressively up ballot. Give people time to adapt.

<comment><USER15> > _Tabulating IRV is much harder, necessitating more software, which > obfuscates the process._

This is a feature, not a bug. The count should be done by hand. The multiple rounds increase the probability that shennanigans will be detected, whether by sheer weight of watching eyes or by numerical irregularities between rounds.

> _Election administrators hate IRV. They 'll oppose, sabotage it at every > turn._

I don't see how to predict which one they will like.

> _IRV is confusing to voters. Try explaining it to your parents._

My parents are in their 70s and have voted this way since before I was born. My paternal grandparents were voting this way before my parents were born. My maternal grandparents voted this way when they moved to Australia.

Tens of millions of Australians vote this way and have done so for about a century.

It does not seem statistically likely that somehow Australia has had an uninterrupted run of particular genius at a multi-decadal/multi-million-person scale that nobody else in the world can replicate ever again.

<comment><USER14> How many races (contests) does a typical urban Australian election have? How many candidates for hotly contested races? How many ballots are procssed?

My jurisdiction often has 30+ contests. We had 22 belligerents for mayor 2 years ago. I think we had 12 for senator in our most recent primary. I dimly recall my county counts 450k ballots.

<comment><USER15> > _How many races (contests) does a typical urban Australian election have?_

Commonwealth, state and local elections are held separately.

 _How many candidates for hotly contested races?_

For Senate elections it is not uncommon for there to be literally hundreds of names on the ballot, which is why "above the line voting" is an option.

 _How many ballots are procssed?_

For a Commonwealth and State elections, millions, with an indicative count (ie, whether there a clear winner on first preferences) made on the same night by tallying across hundreds or thousands of polling stations.

More to the point: it scales. The indicative count is easily parallelised to any level, since summation is a commutative operation.

I think your implication is that Australia doesn't do it at a large enough scale and that therefore, our experiences don't count. That isn't true. Commonwealth elections are comparable in scale and complexity to the operations of those run by the largest states in the USA to handle federal elections.

<comment><USER14> Of course your experience counts. I'm just making sure we're comparing apples to apples. It appears my very shallow understanding of Australian election administration is WAY off. (I'll need to find some sample ballots.)

If you're handling large scale, complicated IRV elections with ease, than that should inform the efforts of our local proponents (eg fairvote.org).

<comment><USER15> I'm sorry for being touchy.

<comment><USER14> No worries. You and I have already crossed swords a few times before. And my writing style has been described as "aggressive". I do appreciate you setting me straight on this. I hate being wrong.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Many people talk about proportional representation; my favorite PR system is the "Random Ballot." It is a very simple voting system and is the only voting system I know of that never suggests strategic voting (when voting in a way different from your preferences is required to get your preferred outcome).

Basically if you have e.g. 100 seats in your house, you choose 100 ballots at random and whomever is voted for on those ballots are the representatives. It averages out to proportional representation, while still allowing geographically distributed candidates.

It also satisfies all of Arrow's criteria[1], which no deterministic system can.

1: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arrow%27s_impossibility_theore...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arrow%27s_impossibility_theorem)

<comment><USER17> Isn't detecting fraud harder in a non-deterministic system? Theoretically in any deterministic system you can recount if there's a question.

<comment><USER18> You would definitely need a random source that everyone can verify.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> I used to support instant runoff voting, (and I still do.) Based on my state's politics, we keep getting candidates who "play the game" with the small group of people who enjoy politics as a hobby, but then fail in a general election because they have no general appeal to the wider group of people who vote.

But, there is a much more nuanced flaw. It's very hard to be an informed voter. A few nights ago, my wife and I spent a lot of time researching most of the candidates on our ballot.

If every race had many candidates, than instant runoff would make being an informed voter much harder. (Granted, my ballot had many unopposed candidates, and in some cases where information wasn't easy to find, I just voted by party.)

IMO, a much simpler thing to start with is just making it easier to be an informed voter. When I lived in CA, I got a pamphlet with statements from all candidates. It was very easy to choose who to vote for in local elections. Where I live now, I just don't get this kind of information.

<comment><USER14> No voter's guide? Not even online? That's really, really bad.

Following declared party, endorsements are a good signal. Some friends created [https://www.readysetvote.org](https://www.readysetvote.org) that serves that purpose. Type in your address, see all the candidates and their endorsements.

Alas, thus far it's just for King County WA.

<comment><USER19> We got a pamphlet for the ballot initiatives.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Back in the day, the Georgia Tech Linux Users' Group had a very simple two- round system. The first round was approval voting; the second round was a run- off between the top two candidates. We voted like this every week to decide where to eat dinner. This extremely simple system satisfies participation, monotonicity and a _weak_ form of Condorcet, where the winner always won pairwise against other candidates in terms of _expressed_ preferences (but not all preferences are expressed). The participation criterion and Condorcet criterion are incompatible in the full sense, so this is as close as you can get. The run-off acts as a correction to AV's tendency to select underqualified moderates.

However, it is a two-round election. A run-off is always necessary. But it can be made one-round via what I call rank-and-star: voters rank candidates by preference, and put a star next to the top N that they like. The two candidates with the most stars are then compared on rankings. It's pretty easy to prove this is mathematically equivalent to the two-round system, but it's not a ranked-choice method because the ballots (1-2-3) and (1-2-3) are different.

Interestingly, it might still be possible to satisfy both participation and monotonicity if you expand the run-off to three candidates and use minimax Condorcet for the final round. For three candidates, minimax = Schulze = ranked-pairs and they satisfy participation; for four or more candidates, no Condorcet method satisfies participation. However, doing this costs you the attractive simplicity of the method (but minimax Condorcet is simple to understand, relative to IRV or ranked-pairs).

Anyway, this puts me in the odd position of advocating a voting system nobody has ever heard of =p

</comment><comment><USER21> Straight IRV is an improvement in that it removes the third-party candidate spoiler effect and the incentive for negative campaigning, yes, but it can actually make results less proportional than FPTP.

What's needed isn't just IRV but STV - think IRV but districts grouped together and multiple winners. That way, you can actually get results that are proportional to the votes cast because the difference between a narrow win and a landslide changes who gets elected down the ticket.

<comment><USER2> The multi-winner system that appeals the most to me is either range (score) or approval voting, with seats allocated proportionally. Unlike STV, it would be possible to support or oppose as many candidates/parties as the voter wants simultaneously. And so it avoids some of the nasty properties of IRV and STV.

<comment><USER21> There's no problem with opposing candidates in IRV / STV - you just rank them at the back of the list. I can't claim to be an expert on all the finer points of STV versus range or approval voting, but it's significant to me that the Electoral Reform Society ([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electoral_Reform_Society](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electoral_Reform_Society)) continue to back STV.

<comment><USER2> It's not obvious to me that all the information about your ranking gets percolated up to the final decision, especially since your middle rankings can disappear without warning during intermediate stages. If you can't do anything to prevent your #2 from getting eliminated, might as well rank them last as far as the system matters.

<comment><USER22> One very important part of getting STV to work well is the quota - if a candidate has enough votes to guarantee that they would be elected (so, for a 3-seat district, 25%+1 of votes) then additional votes should be transferred BEFORE eliminating any candidates.

Some systems do this randomly (randomly choose ballots and take the next preference), and some do this fractionally (e.g. transferred votes are worth whatever fraction wasn't needed to elect their previous choices). Overall, though, the point is that if your middle choice is eliminated, then either your vote wasn't enough, or a previous choice needed your support already.

That said, most systems 'skip' over previously elected candidates as well. Strictly speaking, doing that can mean ballots with a losing first candidate are more powerful than ballots where the first candidate is elected by a narrow margin[1]. That said, as per the wiki link, there's a solution (recalculate all instead of skipping previously elected) and tactical voting around that issue isn't seen in practice anyway.

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Issues_affecting_the_single_tr...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Issues_affecting_the_single_transferable_vote#Tactical_voting)

<comment><USER2> It is possible to have a quota in the range voting system I imagine. And, well, it's simpler.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> While I think IRV is a better system than we have, I think it concentrates on the wrong problem. In practice it only really works on high profile elections where all of the candidates get plenty of public scrutiny. The lower houses like the Senate and House, especially at the state level, usually receive very little scrutiny compared to governors and presidents. But the real power lies more in these lower houses than with the heads of state. They really only have power because their political party already has a significant control in the lower houses. The lower houses usually have the power to override anything the head of state does, and the vast majority of the power the head of state has are just things the lower houses has designated to him/her, which they can just as easily take away.

So I think the real issue is to open up the lower chambers to third parties, and that's best done through the use of Proportional Representation. IRV will not work at that level, because very few races are scrutinized by the public very much. Proportional Representation also eliminates Gerrymandering (or significantly reduces it depending on how it's implemented).

Once you've got a significant number of third parties in the lower chambers, whoever is head of state really doesn't matter that much. Since they'll have to work with pretty much everyone in the lower chambers to get anything done.

<comment><USER14> Approval voting for executive positions, proportional representation for assemblies.

The upper house (eg Senate) in bicameral systems is a special case. I'm undecided if they should be abolished (7 states have more Senators than Representatives) or our state boundaries redrawn.

<comment><USER24> The Senate, and the changes to Senate balance caused by granting statehood, already was a contributing factor to one civil war. It also disenfranchises many Americans: DC has large populated areas that aren't part of any state, but Democrats insist on turning DC into a state in its own right (which would give them 2 extra Senators) while Republicans don't want the Democrats to have 2 extra senators, so the most they would agree to is retrocession to Maryland (similar to how Alexandria was retroceded to Virginia), which the Democrats won't accept because then they get 0 extra senators. (Most DC residents would prefer statehood, but then, most DC residents would also vote Democrat, and it's hard to tease out the conflicting motivations of "we want to have representation" and "we want our side to be more powerful in Congress".)

Puerto Rico also seems to want statehood, but there's no progress on getting it for them for various reasons I don't fully understand.

Redrawing state boundaries would either be politically impossible, or could only happen with a large enough national one-party supermajority that it would basically amount to gerrymandering anyway.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> Here is a very good simulator to get a feel for the different voting systems : [https://ncase.me/ballot/](https://ncase.me/ballot/)

<comment><USER26> ncase.me is very good, but it neglects what I consider to be the elephant in the room - dictatorship of the majority.

If you have a country with 60% A, 30% B and 10% C, then you might like to a parliament roughly representative of that. (A, B, and C could be anything - attitudes to same sex marriage, daylight saving - there are always many ABC sets.) If parliament consists people elected in geographic regions, and A, B and C are uniformly distributed over the regions than all voting systems here will give you a parliament consisting only of A's.

People here seem to enjoy pointing out some perverse outcomes for IRV, but the Arrow's impossibility theorem proves (and ncase.me beautifully demonstrates) all voting systems have perverse outcomes. Yet none are as bad as electing all A's to represent a diverse country and every one of them will do that if used the wrong way, which also happens to be the most common way they are used.

Back to the topic - IRV does have its downsides, but it's not perverse outcomes. Australia tries to use IRV everywhere. The Australia Federal Senate has a voting system that does fix the dictatorship of the majority and naturally they try to use IRV there too. If you ever have the unfortunate experience of voting in an Australian Senate election you'll see why IRV isn't so good in that situation. In fact it's so bad not even the Australian's can use it in its pure form. If you are wondering why, it leads asking the public to number 100 odd boxes in strictly consecutive order, on a 1m wide ballot paper that can't lie flat in the ballot box with writing so small they had to issue magnifying glasses so you could read the candidate names. [https://www.abc.net.au/news/6870332](https://www.abc.net.au/news/6870332)

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> There's a big unaddressed obstacle to IRV which is that it's a little confusing and complicated to explain. This is a much bigger problem than it might first sound like. It is an absolute requirement of any voting system that voters understand how it works and feel confident in it.

<comment><USER28> This is deeply unfortunate if it's really true, because the prime factor in favor of IRV is that it is the second-easiest system to explain after FPTP.

<comment><USER4> IRV is nowhere near the second easiest to explain.

Approval voting: you can vote for any of the candidates you like, not just one.

Way simpler than IRV.

Score voting: give any or all candidates scores.

Easy explanation.

STAR: score the candidates, there's an auto-runoff where the two highest-score candidates get checked to see which is preferred by more voters.

At least as easy to explain as IRV, and _much_ easier to actually understand overall, particularly in making sense of the results and following what happened.

<comment><USER29> IRV: Rank the candidates by your preference, 1st to N'th. Your vote is applied to each candidate in turn, until one wins majority (50% + 1).

There -- simple!

<comment><USER4> Your vote is NOT applied to each candidate in turn. That happens to SOME voters sometimes. But you can also have your 1st choice eliminated _after_ your 2nd choice, and then your 2nd choice is NEVER counted.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> I wish we could just _try_ something. Ok, so maybe IRV is worse than some other things, or maybe it's better. Let's try it. Or let's try range voting. Or approval. Or Condorcet IRV. Or whatever.

We have lots of choices of voting systems. If we only had a way to decide! I hope the irony is not lost on all you bikeshedders out there.

Quit bikeshedding. Start advocating for change. Start at the local level. Get your city or town to switch to the system of your choice. Don't just post on the internet about it.

<comment><USER2> My city is already IRV. If I had any clue how to change that, I would.

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> Just the other day, I discovered a group that is pushing for this very thing. If you're interested in making this system the norm, start pushing for a change in your local area. [https://www.fairvote.org/](https://www.fairvote.org/)

<comment><USER4> Or you could learn more about other options and critiques of IRV in order to realize that our effort at reform would be _better_ spent on STAR voting (or maybe approval voting), even though IRV is better than the status quo.

IRV has the fundamental flaw in that it counts _some_ voters' preferences and ignores others. It's an overly-complex and mediocre _unequal_ system.

Check out [https://www.equal.vote](https://www.equal.vote) to understand what it means to have voting equality and how we can pursue systems that honor that.

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> I must be misunderstanding something, because it seems to me that this basically gives the top candidate their votes, and the second top candidate _every other vote_. What am I missing?

EDIT: Oh, on one of the rounds the top candidate might become the bottom candidate, I see.

<comment><USER31> Let's say Clinton, Trump, and Sanders on on the ballot. Some voters could rank their choice, from most to least preferable, Sanders -> Clinton -> Trump, while others could rank Sanders -> Trump -> Clinton. If Sanders received the least amount of votes, voters with the first ranking would have their vote transferred to Clinton while the voters with the second ranking would have their votes transferred to Trump. It wouldn't necessarily reallocate votes to third and lower ranking candidates to the second ranking candidate.

<comment><USER33> That seems managable when you have 3 candidates. What happens when there are 10 or 20 candidates? Would voters have to list their top 10 or 20 choices?

<comment><USER34> If all your choices are eliminated, then for future rounds it counts as abstaining. If enough people do so that no one crosses the threshold, the process repeats until the last candidate remaining is (normally) deemed elected without reaching the quota (though it could also be treated as cause for a rerun if preferred).

In practice here, even in such large contests the top 5 candidates normally end up with 90% of the vote and there's enough overlap between the parties (the further left parties transferring to centre left, the two centre right parties transferring to each other) that there's normally a clear leader by then, it's rare that e.g. a candidate with 48% gets eliminated in favour of a candidate with 49% in the last round.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> > Instant runoff voting is the system we need

No, it's not.

It's better than FPTP, but then if you threw a dart at a list of single-winner voting methods, you are nearly guaranteed to hit something better than FPTP.

Not only are there better single-winner methods, what we really need need is multiseat candidate-centered (i.e., not party list) proportional methods. STV, IRVs multiwinner cousin, isn't a bad choice here, though arguably not the best. (Degree of effective legislative proportionality is strongly linked to popular satisfaction with the resulting government across modern democracies, and single winner systems inherently produce poor proportionality and, thereby, poor satisfaction—the government fails to represent the electorate, and he electorate tends to dislike the goverment for that reason.)

Single winner systems maximize the distortion of representation due to districting (which is bad even when it isn't _corruptly_ bad in single-member legislative district systems), and maximize the number of people that lack effective representation through voting.

</comment><comment><USER36> Ranked voting is sorely needed in the US. Plurality vote, the predominant US vote tallying system in the US, actually maximizes voter dissatisfaction. That is, if your candidate loses you are most likely to end up with a winning candidate that is polar opposite of your values.

</comment><comment><USER37> Maybe this is the wrong place to ask, but are there any voting systems that allow arbitrary representation? A special case of this is the pure democracy, but most people would likely let someone else vote on most issues for them. Then, on certain issues, you could choose to vote yourself or even change representatives. Also since your representative could be changed at any time, the waste that goes into campaign seasons and partisanship would be replaced with a more realtime focus on issues. Perhaps this is too big a change for the U.S., but it seems like we could try this out, i.e. on StackOverflow, Reddit, or Wikipedia before implementing new governments on Mars and beyond.

</comment><comment><USER38> I don't know why people thing IRV is complicated. Australia has been using this approach for more than a century with no problems.

<comment><USER4> If you want to see how it is complicated, review [https://www.rangevoting.org/Burlington.html](https://www.rangevoting.org/Burlington.html) and (A) see if you even understand (I've seen people literally deny the basic facts or miss the point if they _happen_ to feel politically happy with the outcome in that one example), (B) see if you can understand the situation enough to explain to someone else what happened and why people see it as a problem.

Simply _running_ IRV is easy enough. Understanding it and its ramifications is complex enough that even the majority of IRV advocates don't understand it.

<comment><USER38> Well of course, Arrow's theorem shows that you can have pathologies in every system. This is also true of every apportionment system as well. As we live in the real world, the point is to choose voting systems that have the best outcome. What are the criteria?

\- people need to believe it is fair.

\- it should avoid lop sided results (one party always wins regardless of vote) yet should avoid excessive diffusion (i.e. you don't want to have only fragile coalitions of many small parties).

\- others, all with the aim of _clarity._

As there is no magic bullet people use combinations of different systems:

\- Australian ballot (secret ballot) which most systems use these days; hard to enforce in USA because of first amendment.

\- quasi-independent apportionment processes/committees (as used in CA, AZ et al)

\- party lists (not used in USA) or party-plus-candidate (e.g. Germany)

\- non-party systems (e.g. CA)

\- multi-candidate districts (not used in the US)

\- proportional representation (most democracies) or first-past-the-post (most dependents of Westminster). I'm a fan of the latter BTW.

\- IRV

Mix, match, iterate until an overwhelming majority of people are satisfied.

<comment><USER4> Arrow's theorem only applies to _ranked_ ballots. But there's another concept that still shows how nothing can be perfect.

But really, the question isn't whether pathologies are _possible_ ever, the question is how _likely_ they are. What systems have the best balance to be the most robust while still being practical? STAR Voting and 3-2-1 voting. Definitely _not_ IRV. IRV's pathologies have high enough probability that they _do_ and will continue to show up significantly.

Good starting reference from one of the leading voting theorists:

[https://www.quora.com/What-is-the-best-single-winner- voting-...](https://www.quora.com/What-is-the-best-single-winner-voting- method-for-electing-presidents-mayors-or-other-executives)

<comment><USER39> STAR voting is good, but it makes the (IMO) mistake of taking the average rating as each candidate's score. I think it's absolutely crucial in a voting system to make it resilient to manipulation, and that means that taking the median rating (as in Majority Judgement) is the way to go.

<comment><USER4> STAR does NOT make that mistake. I mean, it literally doesn't. It uses the SUM of scores, NOT the mean _or_ the median. But sum is effectively the same result as taking the median.

<comment><USER35> Sum is effectively equivalent to mean, not median.

<comment><USER4> Well, the main concern most people have with mean is if it ignores abstentions. Sum does _not_ ignore abstentions, they are the same as a marked 0. But you're right that sum is like mean if mean counts all the abstentions as 0's.

I'm open to the idea that actually using median is superior. Could you expound on that?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER40> A re-evaluation of voting systems with ideas from Bruster's Millions would be nice too.

        * None of the Above (NotA) / No Confidence **Note
        * Requiring a fully ranked ballot (at least until after NotA)

If NotA then all of the candidates who've run for the current vacancy in "this election cycle" are banned, and a special election is held from scratch. About 1 month to get signatures/on the ballot and then directly to a special election no greater than 3 months from the date of the failed election.

I still prefer weakest looser elimination ( [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schulze_method](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schulze_method) ) and feel that the above tweaks would greatly improve many of corner cases.

The Wikipedia articles are sufficient to avoid watching the film.

[https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0088850/](https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0088850/)

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brewster%27s_Millions_(1985_fi...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brewster%27s_Millions_\(1985_film\))

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/None_of_the_above](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/None_of_the_above)

</comment><comment><USER41> I like IRV, but it leads to longer ballots and more-complicated voter ranking decisions, and hard-to-predict results in corner cases.

I'd prefer a variant I've not seen discussed elsewhere, but I'll call "Candidate-Delegated Instant Runoff Voting". Rather than allowing each voter to supply a unique 2nd, 3rd, etc choice, each _candidate_ may select another candidate that's considered the "next choice" of 'their' voters, if the selecting candidate is eliminated. They'd have to irrevocably declare this "backup choice" before voting started.

That is: each voter still only selects a single candidate. But in the event that candidate is eliminated, there's a predictable, known-before-hand other candidate to whom their votes get re-assigned in the instant-runoff. There's greater predictability as to who will be helped by a certain vote, and the full result is calculable from the 1st tally of direct votes (or somewhat forecastable from an accurate pre-election poll of voters' top choices).

<comment><USER42> Not sure why this wouldn't devolve into the same two party game theory you get with FPTP -- Vote for Greater Evil with a runoff to Actual Satan vs Lesser Evil with runoff to Milquetoast Sockpuppet.

<comment><USER41> Like IRV, it'd help address the 'spoiler' issue where an emerging constituency is essentially penalized for growing strength, by sabotaging the major party closest to them. This, and IRV, instead gives them positive influence in proportion to their growing strength.

As such, also like IRV, it doesn't totally end tendencies towards two major parties. Even fully proportionate representation systems often trend that way, and such coalitions aren't all bad: they help sinplify choices, making the outsones of elections more gradual and predictable, and make it more likely some stable coalition that together represents a plausible majority can form a working government. But it still creates new competitiveness around the edges, that single-member plurality suppresses.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER43> STAR (Score Then Automatic Runoff) is the system we need. (Or V321 in case there can't be a runoff)

[https://www.equal.vote/](https://www.equal.vote/)

or RRV (Reweighted Range Voting) for proportional representation.

[https://rangevoting.org/RRV.html](https://rangevoting.org/RRV.html)

</comment><comment><USER44> This makes a lot of sense as a system, but who came up with "instant runoff"? should be called "ranked voting"

<comment><USER2> There are many kinds of voting which involve the voters ranking their choices. The difference is in how those choices are resolved. You can get very different election results depending on whether you do instant runoff voting, or use a condorcet method, or use borda count. They're all ranked voting, but they have very different properties.

<comment><USER44> Interesting, thanks for the clarification. I didn't realize how nuanced it can be. For example, when using the Condorcet method there's a chance of not having a winner. From wikipedia[1]:

> This is sometimes called a Condorcet cycle or just cycle and can be thought > of as Candidate Rock beating Candidate Scissors, Candidate Scissors beating > Candidate Paper, and Candidate Paper beating Candidate Rock.

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Condorcet_method](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Condorcet_method)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER45> One of the most eye-opening moments of my CS studies was, when we discussed the Gibbard-Satterthwaite Theorem [1] in a class about Algorithmic Game Theory. I always like to bring it up in discussions about voting. In brief it states that every voting system is either 1\. dictatorial (only 1 vote really counts) 2\. limiting the number of outcomes to 2 3\. is not strategy-proof (you have to vote tactically, for example ranking your favourite lower to achieve a better result)basically people have to 'game' the system to get what they want)

It would be interesting to know how different proposed system tackle this. [Iirc one of the more reasonable approaches seemed to be relaxing No. 3 to make strategic voting computationally hard].

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gibbard%E2%80%93Satterthwaite_...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gibbard%E2%80%93Satterthwaite_theorem)

</comment><comment><USER46> The USA has created a political currency - each vote in Congress, (both houses) is a visible and countable action. This means it can be monetized, and it has been by bags of cash, trips to foreign shores and by many other ways thought up by creative lobbyists - such as wire transfers to Swiss banks. This is the unforeseen consequence of allowing the voter to hold his representative accountable to him/her. Sadly, it has brought the USA the worst of all abuse.

Why not allow the vote to be private? Just give each representative a button and this goes to a simple counter that accumulates the total votes cast. It will be unhackable - a self contained system without connection to any network, and includes a 'vote once' latch to stop voting twice. We need to remove the representatives from all forms of bribery by this simple demonetization.

<comment><USER47> Seems this opens the path to a lot of hidden bribery. I think it would make things much worse.

<comment><USER46> Well, we now have hidden as well as open bribery!!!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER48> It never ceases to amaze me that people fail to see what is the real cause of dysfunction in your election system.

 _It 's the single member constituency._

Also known as single member districts. This is what really ails your election system.

You can toy around with IRV, STV, AV, two round voting, etc etc etc but you will never really fix it. It seem that people think a "real fix" is a three party system. I call BS, you really need 6 to 8. That means multi member constituencies.

Once you go multi member you're very quickly arrive at _party list proportional representation_ as your election system.

</comment><comment><USER27> This is an aside, but:

> _Some publications even blame third party voters for Hillary Clinton 's loss > in 2016._

I don't think there is any plausible reason to believe Clinton would have won in 2016 if not for third-party candidates running. The math just doesn't add up.

<comment><USER49> The raw numbers are there for third party candidate to make a difference. It would only have taken Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin going to Clinton instead of Trump to have changed the result.

In Michigan, Trump won by around 11k votes, and there were around 223k third party votes (172k Johnson, 51k Stein).

In Wisconsin, Trump won by 22k votes. Johnson got 107k there and Stein got 31k.

In Pennsylvania, Trump won by 46k. 147k went to Johnson and 50k to Stein.

I'd guess that almost all Stein voters would pick Clinton over Trump, so take Stein out of the race and in all three of those states Clinton wins that statewide vote unless the Stein voters decide to stay home. I'd guess that those who would vote for Stein would be sufficiently "anyone but Trump" to not stay home.

Those states are all winner-takes-all for the Electoral College, so that would do it. (Maine and Nebraska are the only states that split their electoral votes).

What would have happened without Johnson is a harder call. Trump and Clinton are both terrible from a Libertarian point of view. I'd expect Libertarian voters to be more likely to go Republican than Democrat if there is no Libertarian on the ballot most years, but Trump is so different from what had been mainstream Republicans before that I have no idea who the majority of Libertarians would have picked.

Also, I suspect that many of the Johnson voters were "never Trump" Republicans rather than Libertarians, who would agree with conservative writer and research fellow at the Cato Institute P.J. O'Rourke who said that Clinton lies about everything and is wrong on every issue, but he was endorsing her over Trump because she was wrong "within normal parameters".

<comment><USER27> _" I'd guess that almost all Stein voters would pick Clinton over Trump..."_

I see absolutely no reason to believe that.

<comment><USER49> Compare:

[https://www.isidewith.com/candidate-guide/jill-stein-vs- hill...](https://www.isidewith.com/candidate-guide/jill-stein-vs-hillary- clinton)

[https://www.isidewith.com/candidate-guide/jill-stein-vs- dona...](https://www.isidewith.com/candidate-guide/jill-stein-vs-donald-trump)

Also check them all out at ontheissues.org.

Stein was the Green Party candidate, and Trump was pretty much the anti-Green candidate. Clinton ranges from agreeing with the Green party to indifferent on most of their major issues.

Even where Trump and Stein agree, such as on getting rid of Obamacare, they are massively incompatible (Stein wants to get rid of it for a single-payer system, Trump for just letting the market work it out).

<comment><USER27> Your theory is that people decide to vote and then study each candidate's positions to decide who to vote for?

<comment><USER50> And your theory is that you're right because you say you are?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER51> CGP Grey video on IRV / Alternative Vote: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3Y3jE3B8HsE](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3Y3jE3B8HsE)

</comment><comment><USER52> Having voters rank all the candidates from most to least desirable is a great idea. The IRV method of tabulating their choices is pretty questionable. There has to be a better way.

<comment><USER28> There are better ways, but they are generally more complicated and thus harder to explain to voters. IRV already gets a lot of flack for being too hard to understand, but it's the second-easiest system to explain after FPTP.

</comment></comment><comment><USER53> This piece seems to have been written by someone with no knowledge of voting methods other than first-past-the-post and IRV. Looking outside these two options there are clearly better ones, such as approval voting, which is even simpler. IRV isn't even monotonic!

I don't know why IRV seems to be such an attractive nuisance. Please, skip IRV, just use approval voting.

</comment><comment><USER54> If you really wanted to encourage 3rd party candidates, then Proportional Representation would work even better.

Both are better than first past the post, but agreeing on an alternative is HARD.

The situation in Canada is instructive: the governing left-central Liberals promised to replace first past the post, but reneged on their promise when they realized that the committees studying the issue were going to come back with a Mixed Member Proportional recommendation which would hurt them and help the left-wing New Democratic Party, rather than the ranked ballot mechanism that would help them.

(That's speculation, of course. They gave some other BS reason for breaking the promise)

<comment><USER55> Proportional voting is a vastly superior system for arranging many-people blocks (senate and congress in the US), and also completely breaks gerrymandering.

It doesn't work for individual candidate positions like president, because you can't have a non whole number percentage of a single candidate

<comment><USER56> Electing the president separately, when the president is a position of power and not just ceremonial, doesn't make sense anyway. With a multiparty system, you are better off waiting for a coalition to form in parliament and letting that select the president. Otherwise, either the president or the parliament can act as a roadblock.

Compare with how the system of the Netherlands works: a single country-wide electorate, and no threshold except for the number of votes needed for a seat. The outcome is numerous parties in parliament (i.e., far more democratic than the US) and coalition governments which must be formed or at least supported by parties that got a majority of the votes between them.

<comment><USER22> I'd argue that if the president is intended to be a position of power, then a separate election is good - otherwise, one party (presumably the largest) in the ruling coalition has power far beyond what their vote count would justify, and the person gets power without real input from the electorate.

Especially with many parties, if parties A and B are reasonably similar, it's quite plausible to like party A's platform while preferring party B's presidential candidate. A separate presidential election accounts for that, allowing you to elect A for the house, and B for president.

Note that parties A and B are similar - I'd argue that they'd have to be, and that it's extraordinarily unlikely to get a president the ruling coalition is incapable of compromising with. This works out because overall, the vote for president should be ideologically similar to the votes for congress/parliament. (That working, of course, is contingent on some form of ranked voting for the president, rather than the FPTP system the US has now.)

All that said, I'm from Canada, and I don't really agree with the idea of a single person with large amounts of power, but that's my take if there must be one.

<comment><USER56> Well, in Canada you have a Prime Minister who is elected by the House of Commons? Would it be so much better if the Prime Minister was elected separately? How would a Prime Minister run a government if his/her party was in opposition?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER57> I am more and more convinced that democracy just needs to be one input to the political process, not the only one and maybe not even the primary one.

The United States was never intended to be a strongly democratic place, at least at the national level. Presidents are elected by electors, who are divided among the states according to population, and directed by the state legislatures. Senators were originally chosen by state legislatures, and there are two per state. All federal judges are appointed.

That basically leaves the House of Representatives, who are selected by the people. And they have the most power over spending, which makes sense as a check on entrenched powers.

Over time, we've become more democratic either through amendments or convention. I'm not entirely convinced that's a good thing.

IRV is trying to help choose from the options on the democratic menu, but it doesn't solve the problem of what to put on the menu in the first place.

In California, right now voters are considering a proposition about dialysis treatment centers and what they can charge. If I vote yes (like the insurance companies would prefer) then I am apparently damning dialysis patients to the grave. If I vote no (like the private equity firms that own the centers would prefer) then I am allowing poor patients to be overcharged and subjected to unsanitary conditions. At least that's what the TV tells me.

It just seems like a bad idea to put every technical issue out for a vote. I think that's the logical conclusion of democracy and I don't think it's a good place to go. But it seems like all the new voting systems assume that it is what we all want.

</comment><comment><USER58> I think this should be implemented at the Party primary level. It's too hard to change the Constitution and all 50 states to some kind of run off system. But at the party level, I think it makes sense and would be much easier to roll out and implement.

<comment><USER13> The purpose of the change is to move away from a two-party system, where people are forced to vote red or blue, because green and grey are too small to have a real chance. Only making the change within parties wouldn't fix that at all.

<comment><USER58> I understand that, but from a pragmatic point of view, you have little chance of achieving that. As long as Congressional districts are winner-take-all. And Senate seats are winner-take-all (there's only one seat up for each state at a time, usually). Nothing will change at the Federal level. And as for the Presidency, each state gets to decide how they allocate their electoral votes. Game theory currently suggests it's in a state's best interests to allocate all of their votes to the winner of the popular vote in that state.

And in the meantime, you're going to hit roadblock upon roadblock in trying to get a major disruptive system installed at the Federal election level.

You would have a much easier time getting the system to change from within the Democrat and Republican parties for the primary system, since those rules are set by the parties themselves and not by the states.

So long as the parties are open and accessible to anyone, I don't see a big problem. The parties themselves are composed of many smaller factions (greens, libertarians, evangelicals, etc, etc).

<comment><USER35> > You would have a much easier time getting the system to change from within > the Democrat and Republican parties for the primary system, since those > rules are set by the parties themselves and not by the states.

In any state with citizen initiatives, it involves _less_ wrangling with esconced elites to change statewide rules than party internal rules. That's where the real big changes are likely to happen.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER59> Trying to fix politics by modifying the voting system is like trying to fix dysfunctional corporate culture by implementing some new task tracking system. It actually might have some small benefits, but it ignores tackling the real problem.

</comment><comment><USER60> [https://results.sos.nd.gov/resultsSW.aspx?text=BQ&type=CIALL...](https://results.sos.nd.gov/resultsSW.aspx?text=BQ&type=CIALL&map=CTY&area=Fargo&name=Fargo)

</comment><comment><USER4> What we need is STAR voting or 3-2-1 voting.

[https://www.quora.com/What-is-the-best-single-winner- voting-...](https://www.quora.com/What-is-the-best-single-winner-voting- method-for-electing-presidents-mayors-or-other-executives) lays it out clearly.

STAR is on the ballot in Lane County, OR. We just might find out tonight or tomorrow that we'll see the first ever implementation of a more equal voting system.

IRV is _not_ an equal system, it counts _some_ people's preferences and discards others. [https://www.equal.vote/star-vs- irv](https://www.equal.vote/star-vs-irv)

</comment><comment><USER61> I'm happy with rcv as we have for the federal races in Maine. There was none of the predicted chaos and confusion and the results were well accepted by the voting public.

</comment><comment><USER62> While IRV weakens the major parties, you still end up with a two party system. If you want more parties, then support a parliamentary system.

<comment><USER63> > you still end up with a two party system

Can you explain why you think that is the case?

<comment><USER62> When I look at the UK for instance, which has real variety of parties, you see a parliamentary system with first-past-the-post voting.

<comment><USER64> > which has real variety of parties

We really don't, historically (for the last century or so) it's been pretty cut and dry between either Labour or Conservatives with the occasional coalition (always involving one of those two parties).

<comment><USER62> Hm, I must be mistaken then. Thanks!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER65> See also: [https://represent.us/](https://represent.us/)

</comment><comment><USER66> Hare-Clarke or bust.

Also: multi-member electorates, otherwise the system trends towards two parties exclusively.

</comment><comment><USER67> good video series on voting algos: [https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL7679C7ACE93A5638](https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL7679C7ACE93A5638)

</comment><comment><USER68> IRV doesn't solve the right problem. The biggest benefit of IRV is that it helps to reduce the spoiler effect, but not much else. But I don't think when people talk about election change that they are talking about the spoiler effect. Rather I think the thing people see is this weird trend in society today. Fewer people than ever identify as republican or democrat, yet very nearly 100% of all seats in office at all levels of government are filled by republicans or democrats.

Let's imagine a state had 100 representatives (to keep the numbers nice). And in this state 35% of the population most strongly identified as republican. 34% most strongly identified as democrat. 16% most strongly identified as green, and 15% most strongly identified as libertarian. And this state had a really good geographic mix of people, so everybody was completely evenly distributed. As a nice aside there you don't even need to worry about things like gerrymandering - any sample of any area will have an identical mix of people as any other area. That's good... right?

What would be the most reasonable result for the makeup of their representatives? What would we actually get? I think most of everybody would say the same thing for the most reasonable result. 35 republicans, 34 democrats, 16 greens, and 15 libertarians. Few would correctly answer what we'd actually get - 100 republicans. And in a nutshell, _this_ is the real problem. District based plurality elections, be it first past the post or IRV will trend towards domination of two major parties. The only solution is proportional representation. You get 10% of the votes and if there's at least 10 seats then you're guaranteed to get at least one.

Proportional stands next to no chance of being implemented since it would require the current political establishment to sign their own [political] death warrants, but if we're going to change the electoral system I think we should at least look at solutions that would actually solve the problem.

</comment><comment><USER69> The only people who want to change voting systems are the ones whose preferred candidates don't win.

<comment><USER4> Except for people who actually want a healthy society and see the bigger picture.

If my candidate wins with a plurality and is stymied and sabotaged by a divided population with many people feeling totally unrepresented, that does not create a world I prefer. I want a society where as many people as possible feel included and trust the system. I don't want a situation where losers feel disenfranchised and interested in undermining democracy.

If my views are actually democratically popular, I will be okay with a fairer voting system. If I like that the current system is _unfairly_ weighted in my favor, then it's still very short-sighted for me to defend that system.

Incidentally, I don't advocate for IRV, it's a flawed system. Much better options are STAR, 3-2-1, or approval voting.

</comment></comment><comment><USER70> Seems like it pushes everything to a lukewarm center, change already difficult to enact would be even harder, it goes to "who sorta kinda appeals to the most". I imagine turnout would decline.

<comment><USER71> You end up with the candidate who most voters at least like while offering more choices. Seems like it would wipe out the 'rile up the base' strategy in favor of trying not to offend anyone.

<comment><USER70> Right, I'm saying it's a stable but stale form where candidates optimize being tepid. May seem fine but I see how it would lead to further entrenchment of a ruling class</comment></comment></comment>


Unifying models of data flow (2011) [pdf] - <AUTHOR> http://www.doc.ic.ac.uk/~jpw48/unifyingmodelsofdataflow.pdf

<comment><USER2> The "dual" of this paper (Wehrman _et al._ 2009, mentioned in the introduction) is quite nice and worth reading along. It is likely paywalled (depending on institutional access), but there is a pre-print version available from Wehrman's website [1].

[1] [https://raw.githubusercontent.com/iwehrman/www.wehrman.org/m...](https://raw.githubusercontent.com/iwehrman/www.wehrman.org/master/pub/graphical- models.pdf)</comment>


Why reddit took so long to provide user subreddits. - <AUTHOR>

My guess is that these user subreddits are a threat to the main reddit.  If they were provided too early, then there would have been a danger of significant traffic loss overall. <comment><USER2> That wasn't the reason. The real problem was that they weren't sure how user- defined subreddits should work. Steve Huffman is the kind of guy who won't do something till he's pretty sure he's figured out how to do it properly.</comment>


Using Deep Learning to Segment Chromosomes in Microscope Images - <AUTHOR> https://blog.insightdatascience.com/separating-overlapping-chromosomes-with-deep-learning-based-image-segmentation-22f97afd3283 <comment><USER2> Who is at the forefront of medical imaging today?</comment>


Research on the cerebellum yields rewards - <AUTHOR> https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-020-00636-x <comment><USER2> I did my Ph.D. work on the cerebellum and proposed a theoretical model of reinforcement learning and can add some context for why this is a "big deal".

First, it represents a fundamental shift in how the cerebellum learns. For a long time, it was thought that the cerebellum learned liked a perceptron neural network, i.e. that an error signal was computed and used to change the strength of synapses within the cerebellum to result in the correct output signal to guide motor control (and, we know now, cognitive control). In other words, the cerebellum was a _supervised learning_ machine [1]. But how these error signals were actually computed using the neuronal circuitry was never made clear; most arguments centered around the microcircuitry of the inferior olive. In a perceptron, an error signal is the difference between the correct output and the predicted output. But how is the "correct output" supplied?

As far as I know the first to propose the cerebellum learned by reinforcement learning was the famed cerebellum researcher Richard Thompson [2]. Unfortunately, the idea was only vaguely sketched out the field didn't take this very seriously and continued on with the general belief that the cerebellum learned by supervised learning.

To me and my collaborator, Tadashi Yamazaki, it seemed a more natural signal that the nervous system could capably supply would be a graded reward signal. Moreover, this meant we could interpret the structure of the cerebellum within the theoretical frameworks of reinforcement learning such as the actor-critic framework [3,4]. This is the second reason these finding are a big deal: the paradigm shift to the cerebellum being a reinforcement learning machine, if correct, will be a boon for building better models of it. In the last few years there has been some impressive work done with reinforcement learning in artificial neural networks that could be applied to models of the cerebellum, especially within context of the brain at large.

[1] Doya, Kenji "What are the computations of the cerebellum, the basal ganglia and the cerebral cortex" (1999) [2] Thompson, Richard "The nature of reinforcement in cerebellar learning" (1998). [3] Lennon, William "Towards more biologically plausible computational models of the cerebellum with emphasis on the molecular layer interneurons" (2015) [4] Yamazaki and Lennon "Revisiting a theory of cerebellar cortex" (2019)

<comment><USER3> > most arguments centered around the microcircuitry of the inferior olive

If, like me, you wondered how a poor fruit has microcircuitry, well, I think they're actually talking about the Inferior Olivary Nucleus. Per Wikipedia:

> The inferior olivary nucleus (ION), is a structure found in the medulla > oblongata underneath the superior olivary nucleus. In vertebrates, the ION > is known to coordinate signals from the spinal cord to the cerebellum to > regulate motor coordination and learning. These connections have been shown > to be tightly associated, as degeneration of either the cerebellum or the > ION results in degeneration of the other.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inferior_olivary_nucleus](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inferior_olivary_nucleus)</comment></comment>


Is a professional looking website design crucial for success? - <AUTHOR>

I think that a professional looking website design is becoming a standard for startups. All the famous startups have a nice design. It need not have to be complex, just simple. If I see a website with not so professionally looking design I do not trust it so much. This approach is very strong in my country (Slovakia).
What is your experience? And please, could you have a look at my site - https://reltrek.com - and tell me something about your feelings? We are trying to find out, how important is to pay for professional design in this early stage.
Thank you much! <comment><USER2> I think the design looks pretty good and the service sounds fine. The trust issues you may have are in your grammar. Because the website is written in English, I assume you want to be seen by English speakers. If that's the case, you need to clean it up.

If you don't have much copy to look through, I would be happy to clean it up for you. My email is in my profile.

I can't commit much time so if there is a lot to do you may need to ask someone else or pay someone to do it.

Edit: You can't pay me to do it. I'll do a small amount for free just to help out but I won't do a lot even for money. I don't have time.

</comment><comment><USER3> I think it heavily depends on your target market and what the product is, If your aiming for designers or techies then an amazingly designed website will obviously help.

The most important thing to remember is the usability and content of a website far out weighs the design.

You seem to have achieved exactly that on your website. within a second i knew what you was offering, and 3 seconds what it looks like. A little more reading and i knew what the benefits/features were. You have a great base, well done.

Roy [http://roybarber.com](http://roybarber.com)

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks, it is very valuable for us to have a feedback for such a designer! I certainly agree with you that usability is far more than the design itself. Even more, good design should lead the user to the desired action, I think.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Great site, great looking service ... I'll be signing up shortly to give it a spin.

Answer to your question: YES as long as it is a Great Product / Service and your marketing is spot on.

A great looking website for a poorly conceived or implemented product / service is like lipstick on a pig.

</comment><comment><USER5> Great looking != useful.

There are many websites with questionable style than are by far very usable. I would invest more on UX than cosmetics.</comment>


Inside card sorters: 1920s data processing, relay logic and linear time sorting - <AUTHOR> http://www.righto.com/2016/05/inside-card-sorters-1920s-data.html <comment><USER2> Card sorters are not linear time. They're number of cards x number of columns of sort key. Sort keys, if unique, have to have size O(log N), so card sorters are O(N log N), as you'd expect.

You can beat O(N log N) with a radix-like sort (SyncSort, the first software patent, shows how), but you need more bins than a card sorter has.

<comment><USER3> If you have 1,000 cards and you are sorting on 6 columns, you have to pass all the cards 6 times, which means reading 6,000 cards. Is this O(N log N)?

I know this because I did it for a living when I started working in 1970.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> If you're interested in tabulators & punch cards and the impact they had on human history, read IBM and the Holocaust by Edwin Black. It's a sometimes dry but fascinating explication of the role IBM played in supporting the Holocaust and the strategies the company employed to continue doing business with Germany during the war.

<comment><USER5> >tabulators & punch cards and the impact they had on human history

I think everyone in school came home with a Christmas wreath made out of punch cards. Every now and then I still see cases of punch cards offered for free.

Here is an example of a wreath:

[http://www.computerhistory.org/collections/catalog/102667304](http://www.computerhistory.org/collections/catalog/102667304)

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> If you also wondered about the "linear time sorting" part.

Punch card sorters used an electro-mechanical (even without vacuum tubes) implementation of radix sort.</comment>


Last universal ancestor - <AUTHOR> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Last_universal_ancestor

<comment><USER2> For anyone wondering if there were multiple LUAs: [https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/1bjvxs/how_do_w...](https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/1bjvxs/how_do_we_know_that_there_was_a_last_universal/)

<comment><USER3> Doesn't the existence of multiple LUAs contradict either the word 'last' or the word 'universal'?

<comment><USER2> The possibility of 2 non-monozygotic twins having identical genes is not zero, just astronomically low. Its the same for LUA.

<comment><USER4> The possibility of you turning into a teapot is non-zero, just astronomically low.

<comment><USER2> Is it really possible?

<comment><USER4> Mathematically speaking, yes, it is. The probability of _any event_ in this universe is non-zero.

<comment><USER2> Seriously? Can you point to some links?

<comment><USER4> [https://google.com](https://google.com) comes to mind

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> All I hear is _most stupendous badass of all time_ : (forgive the long quote)

      ... self-replicating organisms came into existence on this planet
      and immediately began trying to get rid of each other, either by
      spamming their environments with rough copies of themselves, or by
      more direct means which hardly need to be belabored. Most of them
      failed,... Like every other creature on the face of the earth,
      [Godfrey Waterhouse IV] was, by birthright, a stupendous badass,
      albeit in the somewhat narrow technical sense that he could trace
      his ancestry back up a long line of slightly less highly evolved
      stupendous badasses to that first self-replicating gizmo — which,
      given the number and variety of its descendants, might justifiably
      be described as the most stupendous badass of all time. Everyone
      and everything that wasn't a stupendous badass was dead.
      As nightmarishly lethal, memetically programmed death-machines
      went, [his parents] were the nicest you could ever hope to meet....

[1] _Cryptonomicon_ , also found here [http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/WorldOfBadass](http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/WorldOfBadass)

</comment><comment><USER6> Why is there only one "beginning of life" on earth? If life is likely to form in earth-like conditions after a few billion years, shouldn't there be more than one "last universal ancestor"? Does this suggest that life on other earth-like planets may be very rare, or that ours is a unique life form for our environment?

<comment><USER7> It's very possible that life arose independently multiple times, but one group grew fast enough to drive all the others to extinction. The life forms we observe now almost certainly came from one ancestor due to the numerous molecular similarities (e.g. use of the same form of DNA).

<comment><USER8> That ignores the possibility that early forms of life combined to form fitter symbiotic life forms.

The parallel that comes to mind is the mitochondria within animal cells, they probably originated as independent bacteria.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Quote from article "Note, however, that some studies suggest that LUCA may have lacked DNA and been defined wholly through RNA".

How can anyone make this claim? Is there a single example of a living organisms that is not DNA based? If everyone organism alive today uses DNA then it is reasonable to assume that the LUCA was DNA based (which does NOT preclude the possibility that life started off as RNA based). I guess that's wikipedia for you.

<comment><USER10> Fortunately, a citation is provided. I guess that's wikipedia for you.

<comment><USER11> > For starters, LUCA may not have used DNA. Poole has studied the history of > enzymes called ribonucleotide reductases, which create the building blocks > of DNA, and found no evidence that LUCA had them (BMC Evolutionary Biology, > DOI: 10.1186/1471-2148-10-383)[0]. Instead, it may have used RNA: many > biologists think RNA came first because it can store information and control > chemical reactions (New Scientist, 13 August, p 32)[1].

These are from the New Scientist article that wikipedia referenced. I don't understand the references here, but hopefully someone will see this that can help explain exactly how an organism doesn't have DNA, only RNA.

\--

[0]: [http://www.biomedcentral.com/1471-2148/10/383](http://www.biomedcentral.com/1471-2148/10/383)

[1]: [http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg21128251.300-first- lif...](http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg21128251.300-first-life-the- search-for-the-first-replicator.html)

<comment><USER12> In order to produce the proteins encoded in DNA, cells first make messenger RNA (mRNA) copies of the information in the DNA and then the rhibosomes translate the mRNA into amino acid sequences. So, while DNA is much more stable than RNA, it's not obvious that an organism couldn't just get rid of DNA, work with RNA, and deal with a higher mutation and degredation rate. Plenty of viruses use only RNA to carry their genetic material.

There's a long-standing debate over whether enzymes or nucleic acids came first. In modern cells, enzymes are necessary to catalyze energy-producing reactions and other chemical reactions, and nucleic acids are necessary to store the information necessary for self-replication. It seems unlikely that nucleic acids and enzymes both were randomly spontaneously generated and worked together in the first self-replicating chemical reactions. Instead, most people have theorized that either early cells used proteins to store information or used nucleic acids to catalyze reactions. It has been shown in the lab that some reactions can be catalyzed by RNA.

So, the theory goes something like (1) self-replicating RNA spontaneously arises that both catalyzes reactions and carries information (2) mutations in some of the RNA causes it to create enzymes, which make much better catalysts and out-compete RNA-only life (3) RNA-enzyme life mutates and starts using DNA as a more stable storage format than RNA, making those DNA-RNA-enzyme organisms more robust and these out-competed all RNA-enzyme organisms.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> The Mew of real life.</comment>


Is Supply or Demand to Blame For Surface RT Being Sold Out on Launch Weekend? - <AUTHOR> http://www.maximumpc.com/article/news/supply_or_demand_blame_surface_rt_being_sold_out_launch_weekend123

<comment><USER2> Spam harder dude.</comment>


The data visualization community needs its own Hacker News - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/i-m-h-o/d78abe86845b

<comment><USER2> It'd be really nice if there was a more centralized place to submit and discuss recent work. I usually end up posting my stuff to visualizing.org, visual.ly, and sometimes hn.

There generally isn't too much commenting going on though, despite generating a decent number of views. This makes sense - I only give feedback to a small percentage of things I see on the internet. I would like to interact with other designers more, but sending unsolicited comments/criticism via a tweet or an email doesn't seem appropriate most of the time.

I included a small note on the bottom of my last project "Have an idea for another graphic? Think I did something wrong? Hit me up! email@example.com | @adamrpearce" which resulted in a couple of interesting email threads. None of those conversations really need to be private though.

<comment><AUTHOR> The feedback from other dataviz people is such an important part of it, and it's hard because we are all so separated geographically and in different companies.

When I make a new project, I'm lucky enough to have a small group of people who are in the business who I can trust to give me feedback. But I've spent years cultivating that group, and it's not really fair to newcomers who want feedback on their first work, or just want to lurk and listen to the experts debate things (which is what I usually do on HN). That's all private or hard- to-find now, which is a problem.</comment></comment>


Where will Google Reader traffic go? - <AUTHOR> http://daltoncaldwell.com/where-will-google-reader-traffic-go

<comment><USER2> I'm not moving to another reader so my primary source of news will disappear overnight which I think is a shock I'm not ready to take. Come June I'll likely go to reader.google.com several times, if not just by mistake or out of habit.

Unless I haven't looked hard enough, I want:

* Reader software that can easily install onto a LNMP stack

* Runs in the browser (Desktop & Mobile)

* Has a UI that's extremely similar to Reader - including the inbox system!

* Is FLOSSy (No license preference)

Why?

* Prevent this from ever happening again (no vendor lock in!). It's also free.

* An app is fine but I have reader set to my homepage - it literally is my news source.

* Unlike others, I prefer the inbox system. Too many feeds? Unsubscribe.

* See point #1.

Any suggestions?

<comment><USER3> Tiny Tiny Rss.

You can use some css themes to have tiny tiny rss to look like google reader.

I tried fever for a while but stuck with Tiny tiny, for me it works better due to the customization options and lower server footprint.

<comment><USER4> I also moved to tt-rss and it works well a few niggles aside.

About the worst thing I can say about it is that the main developer is rather abrasive.

<comment><USER5> I'm also happy with tt-rss. I considered myself a heavy user of Reader with about 500 feeds. The only negative I'm currently experiencing is that the mobile web version has been phased out by trunk, and the very good looking alternate tends to crash my phone's browser every few articles. Since there are multiple native Android clients, I'm not all that concerned.

<comment><USER4> I use the forked version of the Android client and it works very well. I think I tried the mobile web site briefly but don't really care since I do my main reading in a web browser on a desktop/laptop, and the rest on tablets which work the same and then a tiny minority of the time on a small screened mobile device.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> At this point surely the question is "where has Google Reader traffic gone?" Anyone who really cares about using Reader has hopefully moved on somewhere. Surely the new readers are showing up in web server logs by now?

My own weblog is too small to be much use, but Referer data I have suggests it's mostly Feedly. Unfortunately the Feedly scraper doesn't include the number of subscribers in its request headers. And these days the Referer header isn't nearly as useful as it used to be.

</comment><comment><USER7> The clock is ticking, and I'm getting a little nervous because my primary use of Google Reader is maybe slightly unusual.

What I really need is something that's going to let me manage podcast feeds with a web interface, and sync those feeds to an Android app _automatically_. Any suggestions? I'm still using Google Listen even though it was abandoned ages ago, just because it gets this particular feature right.

<comment><USER8> I'm in a similar situation. I used to use Google Listen for podcasts (which was backed by Reader). I never used the online interface, but I've been using Listen a lot.

I tried a bunch of different free and paid apps, but I settled on Pocket Casts, which wasn't free. I'm happy with it - it syncs cross device, it has good config options, it looks _gorgeous_. I don't think there's a web interface, so it might not be the best for you.

<comment><USER9> The Beyondpod beta adds feedly support to replace the google reader functionality. Been using beyondpod for a while, and it's bloomin ace.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Other questions include how content providers behave. I've subscribed to the Dilbert Daily Strip feed for several years. About a week ago they decided they no longer want readers via RSS: [http://feed.dilbert.com/dilbert/daily_strip](http://feed.dilbert.com/dilbert/daily_strip)

<comment><USER2> I think a factor is Feedburner scraped the URL every 4 hours. Thousands of readers all for 6 hits a day? Easy. With Reader the load was minimal _, now that everyone has splintered off the load could become astronomically higher due to inconsiderate configuration_ * and the lack of a centralised cache.

While Feedburner still exists, I doubt it'll be around for much longer. Please correct me if I'm wrong.

* I acknowledge some used Thunderbird or other clients to access RSS, however the majority used Reader which made the load much lower. __Scraping every 15 minutes = 96 hits /user/day or other 'inconsiderate' options.

<comment><USER4> Feedburner is a middleman that caches the real site's RSS feed. The readers (Google, Thunderbird, everyone else) contact feedburner for the RSS not the underlying site. RSS is also the same for every user (but doesn't have to be).

In any event consider whether it is is desirable for readers to automatically know about site updates, and to be able to catch up if they have missed a few, versus expecting them to manually visit.

Unfortunately we can't tell what the reason is behind the Dilbert change. It could range from a pre-emptive removal anticipating feedburner going away through some higher up deciding that the site is so important that people will manually visit instead. The only certain thing is they didn't have to make the change for technical reasons now.

One thing I can be certain of is that anyone in a company defending the provision/use of RSS will have a lot harder time due to Reader going away.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I'm using the AOL reader (yeah I really wrote that) at least initially. It's a very simple (one might say blah) interface that takes almost 0 effort to learn.

Most positive thing is that it was dead easy to import my Reader feed selection.

It would most definitely be weird if Google killing Reader gave AOL some relevance again.

</comment><comment><USER11> I use Digg for feeds and soundcloud/youtube for podcasts. If the podcaster isn't using those mediums, I don't listen to them because there is a lack of a good audio podcasting listening service. Although... I have tried to use digg yet

</comment><comment><USER12> I am hoping to get some traffic to [http://multiplx.com](http://multiplx.com)

</comment><comment><USER13> [http://i.imgur.com/L3JPjqw.png](http://i.imgur.com/L3JPjqw.png) Risky post, I know, but I find it telling that it seems like there are still a number of us scrambling to pick someone to move to, or at least dragging our feet to. I just am so used to clicking on the red and blue icon!

</comment><comment><USER14> We are seeing some good traffic at [http://talll.com](http://talll.com) not sure if it is related in any way to google reader shutting down.</comment>


Small but significant improvements in Swift 5.1 - <AUTHOR> https://www.swiftbysundell.com/articles/5-small-but-significant-improvements-in-swift-5-1/ <comment><USER3> This is a great release, but the thing I'd really like the swift developers to focus on is performance. It seems surprising given how similar swift is to rust, but I've heard some reports of programs spending 60% of their time updating reference counts. I'm not sure the best way to fix that - <USER2> programmers need a way to opt out of swift's default memory model? Is there a way to elide some of those checks in the optimizer? But it seems like for small objects something like that would make a big difference in performance.

This probably doesn't matter much when making iOS apps, but it would make swift much more useful in other domains (like as a web server).

<comment><USER4> Joe Groff (one of the Swift compiler engineers) says they're working on that: [https://forums.swift.org/t/swift- performance/28776/8](https://forums.swift.org/t/swift-performance/28776/8)

> [...] there are already substantial improvements to RC optimization in 5.1 > (and even more in top-of-tree). Using Unmanaged is "cheating" in a sense > because it's unsafe, and it should not be necessary in normal circumstances > to get adequate performance from idiomatic code—if it's safe to use > unmanaged references, then the compiler should know that and avoid reference > counting in the first place. The current Swift implementation is still > nowhere near representative of the performance that should be possible, > since we've been primarily in the "make it work" phase of development, and > are only now starting to get into the "make it fast" work.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> I must have missed the official announcement[0], module stability is a very welcome change.

 _Swift 5.1 enables the creation of binary frameworks that can be shared with others leveraging the language's added support for module stability._

[https://swift.org/blog/swift-5-1-released/](https://swift.org/blog/swift-5-1-released/)

</comment><comment><USER6> A huge(!) release for a minor version. I'm most excited about default values for memberwise initializers, opaque return types and property wrappers.

<comment><USER7> Same for the member-wise defaults! Especially in concert with optionals. I hate having callers explicitly pass in nil, but I'm also not fond of provided a convince initializer, as it is one more thing to change when you add a new member to a struct.

<comment><USER6> I remember hearing at WWDC that memberwise defaults were added to Swift by a student. Apparently pitched the idea in the forums, then went straight PR on it!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> You no longer need to use a return keyword for single expressions:

        func add(_ x:Int, _ y:Int) -> Int { x + y }

        let z = add(2,2)

Might not seem big, but it's nice to removed unneeded boilerplate.

<comment><USER9> I don't use Swift, what's the point of the underscores in the method declaration?

<comment><USER8> Without them, you'd need to name the parameters.

let z = add(x:2, y:2)

<comment><USER9> Ok, but I still don't understand, why would you have to name the arguments to the method?

Are there other languages with this type of method declaration/use site syntax? If so, what's the advantage?

<comment><USER10> The advantage is clarity in the calling function.

With type safety checks, you're mostly eliminating a class of problem by ensuring coders don't call the function with some argumetn of a type they didn't mean to.

But suppose I have a method that takes 5 different strings and performs some computation on them - the type safety check doesn't help me there.

In functions that take multiple arguments of the same type, it can be easy to be mistaken about the intended order of parameters, for example passing the 5 strings (name, address, level, phonenumber, cellphonenumber instead of in the order the function expects (name, address, phonenumber, cellphonenumber, level).

Named parameters -if using meaningful names- make it clear in the calling function the semantics of which parameter has which meaning, so the above mistake gets caught at compile time instead of (worst case) not at all.

Of course, in functions with arguments of heterogenous types they're probably overkill.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> > Since Swift optionals are implemented using the Optional enum under the > hood, we're no longer able to perform the above kind of optional pattern > matching on any enum that contains either a some or none case — since those > will now conflict with the cases that Optional contains.

Wait, so if I wrote my own custom enum with .some and .none cases this will not work correctly? This seems like an overly broad scope; why can't the change have only affected Optional.some and Optional.none?

      public extension Sequence where Element: Identifiable {
          func keyedByID() -> [Element.ID : Element] {
              var dictionary = [Element.ID : Element]()
              forEach { dictionary[$0.id] = $0 }
              return dictionary
          }
      }

Perhaps this could use Dictionary(grouping:by:)?

</comment><comment><USER12> Member initializer syntax at version 5.1? I thought swift was on par with kotlin and typescript, or at least python in terms of features.

<comment><USER13> It's specifically around default values.

If you use any language long enough you will think, hey it would be nice to have X. Alejandro (in high-school at the time) thought exactly that and implemented it himself - [https://github.com/apple/swift- evolution/blob/master/proposa...](https://github.com/apple/swift- evolution/blob/master/proposals/0242-default-values-memberwise.md)

You could almost argue the real feature here is how open the community is to additions like this, and there's no need to wait for people at Apple to do it.

<comment><USER14> Pretty neat and definitely very different from the Go community.</comment></comment></comment>


Did You Find A Deal? - <AUTHOR>

My name is Chris, Founder of DidYouFindADeal. My team and I are confident and ready to show you the product that is going to capture the local online advertising industry.
PAIN: Brick-and-mortar businesses lack a solution that increase loyal customers. Groupon drives new traffic, but this new traffic is un-targeted and does not return as repeat customers; Foursquare cannot verify check-ins and are thus not used by business owners for loyalty programs. The current Daily Deal model has no long term sustainability for local merchants and is extremely costly.
SOLUTION: DidYouFindADeal is a web and mobile application that uses the simplicity of a very proven model (MoneyMailer / ValPak) with the marketing techniques of the Daily Deal Sites. Users Never have to Pre Pay for a Coupon or Deal and Business Owners DO NOT revenue share with us.
FUNDING & LOCATION: We have raised $300,000 in seed funding and are located in Irvine, CA.
TEAM: Our team and advisory board members have Internet Marketing, Local Advertising, IT, International Business and Legal experience as noted in their bios.
TRACTION:
During Beta attracted over 800 merchants to a Free Trial in a 45 day period with 2 sales people. Post revenue with 20+ customers closed
70+ businesses in the pipeline including Tustin Buick, Togo's, and Arthur Murray Dance Studios. Affiliate programs with Starbucks, Wine.com, Omaha Steaks and more.
Completion of mobile app for iPhone and Android <comment><USER2> And you're looking for....</comment>