Florida bans ranked-choice voting in new elections law

Were they ever rational?

What are some examples of the electoral college thwarting populism?

> The electoral college is not a bad idea in itself.

I'm prepared to grant the idea that an extra layer of defence against populism is in-keeping-with the idea of representative democracy itself, and even that there is some merit in giving extra representation to low-population rural states in order to reward them for joining a union where they may be out-voted by the more populous states.

What I can't concede, though, is my position that the electors for each state should be assigned proportionally, as would have been the case if the bipartisan Lodge-Gossett amendment had been adopted. The article below explains why it is an inferior solution to just implementing a national popular vote, and I don't disagree, but I think the Lodge-Gossett proposal is a more "conservative" reform and thus harder to argue against:

https://www.nationalpopularvote.com/analysis-fractional-prop...

If you immediately think "Jew" whenever you read the word "globalist", maybe you're the one with the problem?

Even after the 1992 incident happened, the system continued to be used. I didn't live here back then, but, according to my local friends, after that, counting was automated for a couple elections and, then, it was agreed that while automation offered faster results, the manual process was more trusted by the people.

> bad actors deliberately try to undermine the process by filling social media with false narratives

I'm glad the voting system also weeds out extremists. The problem is that, in the US, said extremists are already in power, because current voting systems don't punish extremism enough.

Congress has an approval rating of 20%

There is no faith in the system as is

The article seems to confuse RCV (voting by ranking a list of candidates) and IRV (a specific way of choosing the winner from such ballots). I'm not sure to which the law applies. Wikipedia has a disambiguation page for RCV that lists these 2 concepts.

There are ranked voting schemes that obey the summability criterion, although they aren't as commonly used as IRV and STV.

It's also quite practical to use a non-summable method with a limited set of candidates since any non-contrived method can use a summary array of length n! by using a count of each possible ranking. E.g. a large 10 candidate election could use only a 15MB summary array.

Delayed counts, recounts, and challenged results with our FPTP elections are now the norm.

How could RCV be any worse?

From the perspective of a major Boudin critic, I don't blame RCV/instant-runoff voting at all. Boudin ran on a platform that had broad appeal, albeit more appealing to some than others--thus his third-round win. The problem is that the appeal of the platform came mostly from how voters understood the issues in a national frame of context, not a local frame of context. SF criminal justice policy already had baked in all the reforms which were part of the national discussion. So ill informed people thought they were voting for one set of policies (policies they already had, in fact) but were getting something far more extreme.

It does speak to the argument that simple majority voting provides a clear mandate--clear, at least, in terms of the American tradition of elections. But that whole mandate argument isn't very persuasive. If there was a traditional runoff, Boudin might still have won, yet we'd almost certainly still be in the same position, including a recall. But let's say Boudin wouldn't have won--SF criminal justice "reform" might have continued drifting toward ever greater extremes as the Overton Window slowly shifted. (The platform had broad appeal, so it still represented a center gravity.) There's something to be said for giving people what they think they want and letting things play out unencumbered, and RCV/instant-runoff theoretically does that better than first-past-the-post or traditional runoffs on average. If preferred policies are truly poor ideas and things fall apart, it then becomes much more difficult for advocates and voters alike to dissemble later. Boudin's policies have forced every SF politician and plenty of voters to reconcile to some extent their politics with reality, and effectively forced the centrist politicians to firmly declare that reforms have become too radical and counter-productive. Previously everybody had been able to avoid that.

I find the whole mandate argument disingenuous. In theory it might make sense in some rare situations, but in practice it's merely part of the rhetoric of a national political party who couldn't care less about mandates--they'll claim a mandate whenever it suits them, and reject a mandate whenever it suits them. And, frankly, voters will often do the same. Boudin's platform had broad appeal, but that won't stop some people from claiming that RCV/IR resulted in voters being cheated; they'd say the same thing even if he won a traditional runoff.

everything except actually doing good for the american public.

Make no mistake, both parties have entrenched themselves to the extent that they no longer have to serve their constituents. I moved from a red state to a blue one a few years ago, thinking it would make a difference. The corruption is everywhere.

The DNC also wants to keep FPTP, otherwise their most effective compliance tool of "voting for [policy candidates, progressives, anyone besides who DNC leadership promotes] is the same as voting for the GOP!" goes away.

Everyone but the extremists wants ranked choice.

I am not sure pepperoni should lose, I was just curious if there was some sort of alternative.