What’s so good about banning ranked choice voting? It’s far superior to what we have now – more fair and would actually allow third parties to get elected. Banning it is only good for maintaining the two-party rule.
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Banning it is good when you feel you are in the minority. Because what we have now allows for the majority vote to be split, and your candidate to sneak into a victory. Ranked choice gives the majority the advantage, because it allows those split votes to be consolidated over the other candidates.
In general I agree with you, but I can at least see/understand the arguments against ranked choice.
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I understand that this ban is selfish and cowardly.
Yes, that is obviously the best and most productive attitude to take.
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I don’t know if the altitude matters. It’s not like they didn’t know what they were doing.
Yeah, and they did the same thing you want to do by allowing ranked choice. You want to use multiple candidated to draw in more friendly voters, then consolidate those votes with one of your candidates to ensure the other side still cant win even after getting the most votes.
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Uhm, that’s not how it works. It doesn’t consolidate votes that do not exist. I think you are assuming that such “friendly” voters will rank some candidate that I desire above the candidate that you desire, so if their primary choice doesn’t win, their vote would go to my candidate. That’s not how it works. Firstly, if someone did not want to vote for either D or R but would vote for Jill Stein or RFK, there’s no reason to think that they’d select either D or R as their secondary choice. If they didn’t select a secondary, their vote would simply be eliminated as if they didn’t vote at all. And if they weren’t going to vote in the first place, it’s logical to assume that they wouldn’t write in a secondary choice.
It’s not possible for a side that gets the most votes to lose in RCV/IRV. The votes are distributed to the candidate that IS most favored by everyone, by definition.
I want ranked choice because that’ll give people an actual, real choice, as opposed to an illusion of choice that we have now. It would allow all of us to act as a collective instead of as two warring tribes. It would allow more people to enter politics, more parties to gain power, and would require actual negotiations and compromise to get things done, things that most people want or find acceptable.
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Right, like RFK’s example polls where he does a lot better against either Trump or Biden alone than he does as a 3rd party. Currently this gets him at best a position as spoiler and at worse a has-been / nobody, while in a ranked choice model he could win if he was 2nd for many after their main candidate and no main candidate could get a majority. See the maps in the article below -
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I’d speculate that in a ranked choice model, he might be listed 1st on many more ballots. People dont vote for 3rd party candidates because they “dont have a chance”, so it’s effectively throwing their vote away. If they knew their vote would consolidate with their preferred establishment candidate should that 3rd party candidate not receive enough votes, many more people would be willing to list the 3rd party candidate 1st.
Right, so you do know how it works. This doesn’t square with your previous post.
You mean my previous post where I specifically said I agree with you but can understand the arguments against it too?
How it also works is facilitating a “anyone but the enemy” agenda. It allows, for example, Democrats to shut out Republicans not because they all prefer a particular candidate, but because they can list every non-Republican option knowing votes will eventually consolidate with one of the “friendly” candidates regardless of who it ends up being. Rather than having to select the candidate they actually like best, and hoping enough of their friends feel the same to procure victory.
The ranked choice system can open the door to 3rd party candidates, but it can also further entrench party politics, yielding victories for the party moreso than for the candidate.
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I don’t understand this example. As I mentioned before, I’m pretty sure that’s not how it works. Is this based on your understanding of how it works, or do you have an external source that describes this in detail so I could review?
I believe there was a Alaska(?) Senate election a couple years ago where this was highlighted. One party split their vote pretty evenly between two candidates, but because of ranked choice the party still won because the votes consolidated with one of the candidates (since no one listed the other party’s candidate as their second choice - “anyone but the enemy”). When in a straight “pick your candidate” election, the other party’s candidate would’ve won with the most votes. (I may have the facts wrong, but it still works as an illustration.)
I think the issue is rooted in the idea of requiring a majority of votes, rather than the most votes. Requiring a majority only works with 2 choices, where one has to have a majority to have the most. With more than two choices, requiring a majority [at least feels like] manipulating the result because you’re inherently forcing some voters to compromise and support someone other than who they actually chose.
Again, as I’ve said, I generally agree with you. But I can also see why people are opposed to it, and it isnt all due to ignorance or selfishness.
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That is my problem with rank choice voting. Most people cannot name their representative in Congress or the three branches of the federal government. To expect them to be able to meaningfully rank a large number of candidates does not make sense. This ignorance will lead to perverse results such as the election of the Soros district attorney Chesa Boudin in San Francisco. Boudin’s left wing politics lead to such destructive results that he was recalled in that notoriously left wing city.
Edit. More on Chesa winning with ranked choice voting
In rank-choice voting, Boudin finished with 85,950 votes, for 50.72 percent, edging out Loftus’s 83,511 votes (49.28 percent).
And his recall
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No, it doesn’t work as an illustration. It is illogical. In a 2-party election, the people who voted down the party line would still vote down the party line, and their party would have won. Do you think every Democrat who voted in 2020 actually wanted to vote for Biden and every Republican who voted actually wanted to vote for Trump? I guarantee you they didn’t.
By “the most votes” do you mean plurality? That’s not how RCV/IRV works. The winner is the one who gets the majority after the losers are eliminated. Has nothing to do with plurality.
There’s no manipulation and no forced compromise. AFAIK, voters are not obligated to rank every candidate – they can make as few or as many choices as they like. They can write their only choice as #1 and that’s it, no compromise needed. But I would argue that a compromise is better than no compromise – with multiple candidates running, the voter can select not only their most favorite candidate, but also their least favorite.
I understand this. I’m just trying to find out why you think someone might be opposed to RCV for logical (as opposed to selfish) reasons.
So you’re saying that Americans are dumber than Australians or Irish? According to Wikipedia it’s already being used in Alaska and Maine.
What does this have to do with RCV? The article doesn’t mention any faults in the voting process. He won because he was the most preferred candidate, plain and simple. Just because he was bad at his job doesn’t mean he wouldn’t have won a straight up majority election.
Also the fact that he initially only won the plurality (35.6%) does not guarantee that he’d win the majority. He was the preferred candidate among those voters whose first choice was someone else. But their first choice lost, and their votes were redistributed to their next choice until only two candidates remained, at which point the majority wins.
Just because it is used in some places does not mean it’s a good system. After all, it was used in San Francisco resulting in a big mistake that had to be rectified by the voters after much damage. Voters who were forced to choose Boudin as one of their ranked choices never suspected they would put this radical in office.
In the design of a system, simple is more reliable. The Voters of Oklahoma made the right decision to stop the adoption of this scheme in their state.
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There’s [almost] always a third option. And that third option draws some votes from either side (or both sides). The only question is if it a outsider (like Ross Perot) or a second party-type person (like in the illustration).
Yeah, it is. They keep recounting until someone has the most votes, rather than simply taking the person who received the most votes.
Yes, there is. A voter is having their vote count towards a candidate other than the one they preferred. “My guy didnt win so I guess I’ll kick it to your guy since he isnt that evil option” is the definition of compromise.
Even though you apparently cant see it, I’ve already explained why.
I didnt mention it, but the concept can also be spun as giving voters more than one vote.
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Again, no voter is ever forced to make any choice they don’t want to make. Why do you keep saying this? Boudin winning means that he was the preferred candidate by most people (for those who preferred someone else that would have lost anyway, they preferred Boudin over all the others). The problem here is not the fact that he won with that particular voting system, but the fact that he did a poor job. His performance has nothing to do with how he was elected.
He also won the plurality (more votes than anyone else, but less than 50%) in the first round.
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I’ve lost your train of thought here. I thought you liked the idea of requiring a majority of votes. After all that’s what our current system requires – a majority. RCV/IRV retains this quality. What you are describing is plurality voting. You seem to be implying that the issue is rooted in the fact that both our current system and RCV/IRV require a majority vote as opposed to a plurality vote. I don’t know the advantages/disadvantages of a plurality voting system, but RCV/IRV is (IMO) superior to what we currently have and still requires a majority, so I don’t see how banning it outright could be rooted in the fact that it’s not a plurality system.
That’s compromise by choice, it is not forced. Nobody is forced to kick it to another guy since he’s less evil.
If my guy doesn’t win I want this other guy to win isn’t giving me more than one vote. It’s giving me a chance to elect a majority winner. All it really does is combine multiple elections into one. Let’s say there are N number of candidates running:
- Day 1: vote for your favorite out of N candidates. Nobody wins a required majority and your #1 choice got the fewest votes, he’s a loser.
- Day 2: IF YOU WANT, vote for your next favorite out of the N-1 remaining candidates.
- Day 3 through day N-1: Repeat until only 2 candidates are left so that one wins the majority.
Nobody got multiple votes, you simply get to combine multiple elections (and save a bunch of time and money) into one. I suppose it appears to give each voter more than one chance to pick a winner, but it’s still exactly one vote for the winner, and as I illustrated above it should be considered as though multiple elections occurred, and in each election you only got one vote.