We have this for all elections in Australia. It works great and allows you to vote for your single issue party but fallback to a more mainstream or centrist party without spending your ballot.
Unfortunately, RCV only fixes that assuming that you have more than two candidates on the ballot.
This time there were 4 or 5 candidates for president in Maine, so I voted for the 4 I liked. Felt good, but honestly, the largely two-party system prevented many great candidates from being on the ticket.
I would likely be a green party voter by choice, but when there's a republican on the ballot, there's no way I'm voting green - the downside of having the republican win is (for me) larger than the downside of not casting my vote according to my conscience.Adjust to suit your own political preferences - perhaps you'd like to vote libertarian but are worried about allowing the crypto-DSA democrat into office, etc, etc.
This is MAJOR. The US, the UK and other first-past-the-post systems need RCV or something similar so badly.
[EDIT: yes, STAR is likely even better]
What drawbacks/surprising consequences, if any, are there?
If MA passes theirs it could pick up real mainstream momentum though.
I get that this is conventional wisdom, and a lot of smaller parties support rank choice voting because they think it helps them. But neither of the major parties like "spoiler" candidates, it seems like the ability to "collect" votes from the green or libertarian parties would be in their interest.
I suspect the reason it's not more widespread is more mundane. It isn't incomprehensible, but it's more complicated than what we have. If you're explaining you're losing. Also people are (perhaps rightly) cautious about messing with how elections happen. Finally, it doesn't ignite the same passions as abortion or police reform. The interest groups pushing most strongly for it are, by definition, small and not really powerful.
So in a field with a lot of contenders it can favour marginal candidates.
You also end up with an absurdly big ballot. Past, say, five ranks the choices are hardly meaningful.
I’m favourably disposed to this type of voting but those are a couple of downsides.
How does the type of voting affect the number of people on the ballot?
Under a ranked ballot system you can vote for a super marginal party confident that your more mainstream preference will ultimately get your vote if your marginal candidate loses.
This encourages votes for smaller parties
Change the voting process and I could vote for Party Q, then F, then D and have something closer to my true preferences be measurable vs today and give the parties a sense of where they stand with the populace. I’m still not convinced it breaks the binary star in US politics.
Right now, if those are my prefs, I have a choice of voting Q, voting D, or staying home. If Q is a third party, there’s an argument that vote might as well have not been counted or cast (because from today’s voting you can’t infer the true level of support for Q because some Qs cast their ballot for D just on the off chance that R would otherwise win; for the same reason, you can’t tell as much about the true R or D support either).
Alternatively cardinal systems scale trivially (you express how much you like an individual candidate -- independently-- not how much you like a candidate -- comparatively -- to another candidate). You can bullet vote a party line if you really want.
2017, likely that Bernier would've won, but I'm not convinced that he was more well-known than Scheer. Happy to be proven wrong here.
The 2020 result would likely have been the same as it is now. A small contingent of Sloan/Lewis supporters strategically voting would have tipped it to O'Toole.
Canada uses it for a lot of leadership elections. What often happens is that a candidate nobody knows or really wants wins because they got picked so their vote wouldn’t go to the main competing candidate.
So you get party leaders who nobody seriously examined as the more hardcore members just needed to park their votes.
The frequently imagined scenario with IRV is that, in a two party system where most people will rank 1 of 2 parties first, then a small percent of voters can safely rank a third party first. This party is then eliminated, but not before a surprisingly strong showing (e.g. 5% first rather than the .05% we currently have). This would likely happen.
The problem arises in the next election, when the third party is now strong enough to command a large percent of first place votes. Since the party with the least first place votes is eliminated (even if they have a ton of second place votes), the third party now stands a real risk of cannibalizing votes from the next most similar "mainstream" party. If this cannibalization were to occur, both parties could lose to the other mainstream party that many voters might not have preferred! Due to this risk, it's likely voters would strategically rank the third party below the mainstream party even if that wasn't their true preference. In this way, IRV can still lead to 2 party dominance.
It's true that third parties would be unlikely to map to the current political spectrum in such a "pure" fashion. However, that just means that voters reject the political choices currently on offer. Voters really should have that option.
Even granting A, B is definitely not true. There are many similarities between the two major parties, and removing one in favor of a third party would likely split voters between the third party, and the other major party.
Also, A is not true either, so the distance between parties becomes even more unclear.
I for sure believe voters should be able to reject the current political choice on offer! I support IRV over our current system for sure. But, my main point is that IRV is actually not what many people believe it to be, and is far worse than other, simpler systems, such as approval voting.
With ranked choice universally adopted there I would have hoped for more diversity of representation :/
Generally, election reform advocate for something like RCV for executive races and proportional representation (PR) for assemblies.
PR can moot districts, eliminating some attack vectors, like gerrymandering.
(I don't know the Australian answer to that, but where I live the answer is "the ultra-rich and the investor class", "Republicans, but they like to keep Democrats in their pocket, too", and "yes, and it seems to get worse every year")
RCV would be a great improvement, but as long as money rules, things are gonna keep sucking.