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Comment by karmelapple | Hacker News Reader

Ranked Choice Voting, which is now the law for all elections in the state of Maine except the Presidency, is a way to help ensure that the winning candidate has been chosen by at least 50% of voters, even if the winning candidate wasn’t the first choice for all voters.

Adopting RCV seems to me like one of the best ways we can improve the health of the US’s democracy going forward.

Any voters Massachusetts can vote this November to have RCV statewide, just like Maine, from local elections up to the US House and Senate elections. I’ve volunteered with the group [1] helping Massachusetts join Maine in leading the way.

[1] https://voterchoice2020.org/

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My current view is that having districts undermines everything. Once politicians are elected due to a specific geographical region,

1. they are beholden to that region,

2. You get an all-or-nothing approach to elections.

With respect to 1: the main problem is that such a system will put the interests of the country second to the interests of the district.

But even if you think that is an acceptable trade off, there's 2: all-or-nothing. RCV is one way to partially mitigate this, by letting voters specify more choices.

Of course, ideally you'd want proportional representation. A simple solution is to abolish districts and have one multi-seat election. All votes count, the N candidates with the most votes are elected.

(Of course, if you prefer to maintain districts, you can achieve the same by increasing the number of electable seats per district.)

RCV is an improvement on FPTP -- almost anything would be! -- but Approval Voting is even better. It is easier to implement (the ballot doesn't change at all, just the way it's counted), simpler for voters to understand (you just vote for every candidate you approve of), much less susceptible to strategic voting and not at all to strategic candidate selection, and therefore much less likely to return an anomalous result.

http://www.electionscience.org

It has also been adopted for all municipal elections in New York City.

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