Ranked-Choice Voting Helped Wreck Minneapolis | Hacker News Reader

Ranked-Choice Voting Helped Wreck Minneapolis

wsj.com

12 pointsjkuria7 comments

Works pretty well for entire countries like Australia. Pretty arrogant to blame the vote counting system

This article has approximately nothing to do with ranked-choice voting.

But about that… I’ll consider criticisms of how to use the vote count only after the vote count can be formally proven.

For those without a WSJ subscription, it’s an opinion piece authored by Vin Weber, former congressman (R-MN) and lobbyist who worked with Paul Manafort in Ukraine, and Annette Meeks, current CEO of the Freedom Foundation of Minnesota, a conservative/libertarian small government think tank. Mr. Weber also works there now.

TL;DR: RCV brought Minneapolis weak leadership partly because it failed in its promise to increase voter turnout and improve the tone of campaigns. Minneapolis has had 3 RCV mayoral elections, and it mentions NYC also, but the majority of the piece offers pretty standard lines about how city is run by a politically correct mob and has no direction.

I wish the RCV part provided more data to back up its role in the current situation, but the authors seem more upset that it elected a Democrat.

HN had a Wall Street Journal article against RCV the other day, and I commented that I hadn't realized that it was a partisan issue.

I'll be interested in keeping an eye on this. I have the impression that (a) HN is very much in favor of RCV and other voting systems, and (b) HN skews somewhat to the right. (I'm much less certain about b, and I'm trying really hard to take into account the way you see opposing voices as much louder than those of your supporters.) It will be interesting to see this shifts the balance of opinion on HN.

(I'll not that I'm not especially a fan of alternative voting systems, on the grounds that I don't think they'll make as big of a difference as people hope. I'm all for them if people think it will reflect their preferences more accurately, but I believe they'll be disappointed.)

I can't read the whole article due to a paywall. But I would be curious to know how the author addresses that the winner of the mayoral election was also the FPTP winner.

> The victor in that 16-way race was Jacob Frey, who prevailed after six rounds of counting that took 24 hours to complete. He became mayor despite being the first choice of only 25% of voters.

Looks like even though he was only 25% of voters first choice, that's still a plurality. He was the first-round winner too[0]. So what difference did RCV make?

[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2017_Minneapolis_mayoral_elect...

This article is 100% right

Well the article is behind a paywall, but what I could read of it seem to be pretty trash.

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