this post was submitted on 03 Nov 2024
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Ranked Choice Voting
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Voting is broken! Let's fix it.
Ranked Choice Voting (RCV) is a voting system in which voters rank candidates by preference on their ballots. If a candidate wins a majority of first-preference votes, they are declared the winner. If no candidate wins a majority, the candidate with the fewest votes is eliminated, and votes for that candidate are redistributed to the remaining candidates, based on the next preference on each ballot. This process continues until one candidate has a majority. Learn more about how it works.
Why Ranked Choice Voting?
- Prevents the tyranny of the middle
- Encourages diversity of candidates
- Discourages negative campaigning
- Provides more choice for voters
- Saves money by avoiding runoff elections
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On the D voting guide it said wealthy donors shouldn't influence CO elections. I assumed dems would want rcv so I'm a bit confused here.
I’m a Dem but do not want RCV. I want 3-2-1 or STAR but would settle for Approval. RCV/IRV is the worse possible option as a replacement for plurality besides an option called Borda that sometimes results in the opposite candidate getting selected due to strategic voting. Why in the world would I vote for something that is almost guaranteed to confuse people and then result in us rolling back RCV because people don’t like it? Let’s start with an actual good polling option, we really only get one chance at it because there’s no way in hell people are going to want to experiment a second time.
The places where it's been tried in the US, people generally have really liked it. The only places I've seen rollback campaigns have been from scared Republicans, which I interpret as a good sign.
What? That's usually the opposite of how it works.
I don't have any kind of strong preference among the not-FPTP voting options, but I think grabbing one that's getting traction and making an improvement to the existing system sounds like a good thing, even if what we're replacing things with isn't yet the perfect option.
If you don't have a strong preference now, I would urge you to look deeper into the pros and cons of potential alternatives. RCV carries some very glaring weaknesses that make it only marginally better than FPTP, including the lack of a guarantee of a Condorcet winner (it shares this property with FPTP) and the introduction of perversity (which FPTP does not suffer from).
I'm never for letting the perfect be the enemy of the good, and there is no truly "perfect" voting system, but RCV seems like such a minor improvement that I believe effort would be better spent on something with a bit more impact.
I've looked into this before, and most of the cases where rcv fails seem relatively unlikely in real elections. I'd be happy with Star, IRV, RCV/IRV ballots with the runoff process modified to be a Condorcet method, approval. So I'll support any initiative to change to any of these systems.
Saying that IRV has glaring problems that make it not much better than fptp seems unsubstantiated.
For any voting system you propose, there are going to be properties you want that it fails, but like, some of those seem more important in real elections than others most of the time, and IRV seems reasonable in most cases.
Am I missing something big?
Yeah, I really don't understand this "it's only 150% better than FPTP, it is HORROR, we need to avoid" point of view.
If there's something else better, then great. Advocate for that. In the meantime please don't try to stop us switching from FPTP to RCV. Some of their other points, that experimenting with thing 1 one time will lead to not wanting to experiment with thing 2 a different time, just seem nutty to me.