Til it's undemocratic to want your vote to count
this post was submitted on 25 Oct 2024
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Ranked Choice Voting
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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.
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Why aren't I surprised that Steve Forbes is upset at the thought of losing 3rd-party spoilers? Does he have another video extolling the virtues of the Electoral College?
This episode of What’s Ahead describes how this scheme works and leads to voter confusion and weird, undemocratic results. In Maine, for instance, a Democratic Party candidate for Congress was declared the winner, even though he received fewer votes than his Republican opponent.
No, actually that is not what happened. He did not receive fewer votes than his Republican opponent. No candidate received a "vote", they were ranked. It is ranked choice.
https://www.wbur.org/news/2024/10/21/how-does-maine-ranked-choice-voting-work
Then-GOP Rep. Bruce Poliquin won the most first choice votes in 2018, but lost to Democratic Rep. Jared Golden when votes were reallocated after removing the third- and fourth-place finishers.
The most voters did rank Poliquin as their first choice. However, the majority of the people in Maine indicated that they preferred to elect Golden instead of Poliquin. Golden received the most "votes" when you actually count all of the "votes", which requires considering the preferences of the people that ranked the 3rd and 4th candidates as their first choice, too. If you just throw their votes out because Poliquin received the most first choice rankings, then that's literally just first-past-the-post again, and not ranked choice.
The bottom line is that more people in Maine preferred Golden over Poliquin. First-past-the-post is only useful for measuring the preferences among a group when there are ONLY 2 CHOICES TO PICK FROM. In that situation, I have no problem with first-past-the-post and it works great. As soon as their are more than 2 choices, you need a better strategy. Imagine trying to pick out a restaurant to eat at with a group of people. If you just ask everyone to pick their favorite, how often does that work out as a consensus?? And when you count it up and figure out the "majority favorite", half the room groans. And the whole time, maybe everyone's second favorite is the pizza place, so what would make the most sense is to just go there. But you don't have enough information to figure that out with just "pick your favorite". You need to ask more questions. The way to figure that out is to have everyone rank all of the choices and start at the bottom, not the top. "Only you picked the sandwich place as first choice? Sorry, but no one else really wants to go there. Its out. So what was your 2nd choice?". Ranked choice = furthest-from-the-post-loses,-and-we-go-again-until-we-get-a-choice-all-the-way-to-the-post,-as-a-group. It is a group decision.
Tell me how it is undemocratic to select the preference of the majority? Hillary Clinton won more votes than Donald Trump in 2016, period, bottom line, but Trump was elected. Forbes, where was your outrage about THAT being undemocratic?? This is so heinous and infuriating because Steve Forbes fucking knows and understands all of this, but is blatantly being misleading.
No candidate received a “vote”
Nonsense. You receive your 1st preference votes, and then if no candidate has achieved an outright majority, the last candidate is eliminated and their 2nd preferences receive their votes, etc.
Yes, IRV involves giving preferences to candidates rather than just a simple single vote for a single candidate, but your vote is distributed according to your preferences and it's silly to talk about it as though votes don't go to candidates. That kind of language would make more sense for a system like range voting or maybe Borda Count, just not IRV where you can count the election by physically moving individual ballots into piles for each candidate and counting them.
That's a good point. I often see ranked choice being misrepresented (in the USA) by confusing the terminology and semantics like this, so I was just trying to emphasize the difference. But your explanation also makes sense and is accurate description of ranked choice as I understand it.
Yeah I was probably being a little extreme by starting that comment with "nonsense". But yeah we use IRV for most of our elections here in Australia, and it's very routine to talk about which candidate received which votes.
Man, fuck Forbes