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Comment by unethical_ban | Hacker News Reader

I respect the idea that paper is "unhackable" and that decentralized voting counts are less vulnerable to attack.

I've been thinking alot about Ranked-Choice Voting (RCV) and how to do an instant runoff with paper ballots at scale, notably for something like President. I suppose it's unlikely to occur, but in the instance of a national popular vote for president that results in a runoff, it is worth the extra time to go back through and count. After all, TV entertainment aside, there is no need to have results in same-day.

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I am a pollworker in San Francisco, and I can tell you from personal experience with thousands of voters that Ranked-Choice Voting is widely misunderstood. The common refrain is: I only want to vote for this one candidate, and not for anyone else. In a hotly-contested election, they absolutely do not want to vote for the other guy as #2.

How hard is it to explain to people that their vote only goes to #2 if #1 is already out of the running?

Well, you only get an opportunity to explain something when they ask.

It’s a challenge when people have only ever been exposed to first-past-the-post voting systems their entire life.

And besides, it’s really not fair to assume that voting systems are simple to understand. Just have a look at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_electoral_system...

I don't know why you're downvoted, but as someone advocating for RCV, I think that the "instant runoff" method is about as easy as it can get, next to the FPTP we use today.

I agree there are other methods that are better by the book than the IRV method, but are exercises in statistics and graph theory.

Then make it optional preferential voting. You can number as many boxes as you want.

It works that way in New South Wales. Apparently in Ireland, Northern Ireland, and Malta, too.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Optional_preferential_voting

An interesting take, thank you. I wonder which would be more complex to explain: That is is easier to just rank the candidates and each "non-primary" vote only counts in a runoff? Or Do "optional" voting, and explain that if their #1 candidate gets eliminated, their voice will no longer count?

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