Ranked choice voting is a complete scam, obscured by complexity.
I would never live anywhere that has it.
I would never live anywhere that has it.
These substitutes all have issues. Party-segregated primaries promote extremism. Polling is inaccurate. When candidates drop out early, they take away choices from voters.
Ranked choice voting combines multiple rounds of voting into a single ballot. The winner is the person with the most support from voters.
First past the post: winner has the most first-choice votes. Ranked choice: winner has the most people who would vote for that person if other candidates couldn't win.
Ranked choice results in the best outcome. The winner has the most support from voters, and the data from the ballots informs future campaigns better than polling ever could have.
Then why introduce the complicated system if we're already doing it in your opinion?
> Primaries promote extremism.
Wow what a statement, please elaborate. Personally that's the only time I've seen issues talked about the majority of the time. Otherwise it's just non-answers and pandering.
> Polling is inaccurate.
That has nothing to do with the voting system and everything to do with the media and pollsters.
> When candidates drop out early, they take away choices from voters.
Not really and it's not relevant, if they didn't survive the primary, if they drop out of the race they would have been a bad representative anyway.
> Ranked choice results in the best outcome.
Saying it doesn't make it true. It's overly complicated and you haven't said anything of substance to make it worth switching over from the simple voting system.
Because the current system promotes extremism.
> Wow what a statement, please elaborate.
Abortion is an obvious example. The vast majority of Americans are pro-choice, but the majority of R primary voters are pro life. If a Republican votes for a pro choice bill they'll be primaried and lose, even though most of their constituents agree with the vote.
They drop out often to prevent being a spoiler for the candidate they prefer of the remaining options. If Nader dropped out in 2000, Gore would have likely won. Nader, if anything, showed he was a bad representative by dropping out.
Not sure whats so complicated about just ranking the candidates in your preferred order. Sure marginally more complicated than FPTP, but if that is too much for someone, they are feel free to just mark one candidate.
Primaries promote extremism because they segregate the first rounds of voting to specific parties. Each primary will remove candidates that might otherwise have majority support, in favor of candidates who have the most support from that particular party only. This is bad enough in the US's two-party system, but would be even worse if there were more parties.
Polling informs voters which candidates they should vote for, and which candidates would be pointless to vote for. In first-past-the-post, it's a waste to vote for anyone other than the two most popular candidates. Voters may drop support for their preferred candidate based on polling incorrectly saying that person had no chance.
Candidates who drop out to prevent vote-splitting only do so because the current voting system doesn't allow voters to specify that they like two people equally. There's no reason why having two good choices should skew results toward one bad choice.
Limiting voter choice limits democracy. Each candidate is slightly different, and the determination should be made by voters. But our current system often requires candidates to drop out before voters can make that determination.
Consider presidential primaries. Candidates attend primaries one region at a time. Along the way, polling and results from completed primaries inform which candidates should stay in the race. Candidates drop out to put support behind others based on these early results that only represent certain states. If candidates didn't drop out, they risk dragging down all similar candidates. This situation isn't ideal, and is solved by ranked choice voting.
I'm not familiar with Alaska's version of ranked choice voting. But I am familiar with Maine's. In Maine, the ballot allows voters to select candidates in order based on preference. If the first choice candidate wouldn't have received majority support, the second choice vote is used, and so on.
Maine's implementation is the same system used in run-off elections, but done all at once on a single ballot. A run-off election happens when the winning candidate is required to have >50% of the votes. The worst performing candidates are dropped, and a new election takes place. This continues until the winner of an election has >50% of the vote.
Pre-RCV, Maine had several elections where the winner had ~35% of the vote, while the other two candidates were equally liked and their voters would have supported either. The solution was to require a candidate to get >50% of the votes to win, and the possible implementations were run-off elections or RCV.
RCV enables voters to specify that they like more than one candidate, while also specifying which they prefer overall. They get to say, ahead of time, "if my favorite loses, vote for my second favorite". There's still only one vote from each person in the result.
Personally, I don't find RCV to be complicated. It's simply an instant runoff, without the costs of holding multiple elections. But maybe that comes from me living in a place where run-off elections were common. I think you may agree at least that it's good to require the winning candidate to have majority support, and failing that, would you agree that it's better if they have majority support than majority disapproval?
It's much simpler to have one vote from one person for one candidate.
You shouldn't have to have a degree in stats (and that doesn't help much) to calculate the winner.
Voters should be confident in the system and that means being able to verify it yourself with simple addition.
Ranked choice voting is like the current tax code, full of exceptions and rules for the elite to manipulate while the common person gets boned.
If there's only two candidates.
You either got a vote from a person or not, leave it at that.
Currently you have Alaska being majority red but Pelosi losing to a Democrat, I wonder how that happened.
But certain people when they lose want to change things, whether it's advocating abolishing the Electoral College or implementing a complex RCV system to create arbitrary rules to tip the scales to candidates they favor.
-- edit @mikeyouse --
No I'm not mad, as I said I prefer to live in a place that has a simpler voting system where it's easy for everyone verify the vote and be confident in the system.
I'm maybe more disappointed in people allowing it and being that naive.
Do you feel the same way about the tax code or should just voting be complicated?
How do you feel about the EC system? Were you advocating getting rid of it recently?
There's a certain group of people wanting to flip the game table up here recently.
-- edit @ceejayoz --
So the flipside of your statement would be you "grumping" about the simpler system.
Has RCV solved the split vote issue? Hint: no it hasn't. Nor was that ever really a problem, just an excuse to implement RCV.
-- edit @esoterica --
That's an extremely partisan take and not at all what I've heard from Alaskan friends. Pelosi is well respected in the party and in the state, no matter what liberals think, they usually mix her up with Tina Fey anyways.
But if a heavy blue state elected a red governor (especially with a popular blue opponent) out of nowhere immediately after switching to a new voting system people here would be suspicious right?
But because it happens that blue candidates are winning in areas they weren't before, everyone here is fine looking the other way and even defending it.
It was a ballot initiative that passed by will of the people. Who are you to argue about their decision?
It's their choice, but it's a stupid choice. Personally it seems they were naive or even lied to about the outcome.
I can argue their decision because of the 1A. Same as you can argue against their previous system...
..
> But certain people when they lose want to change things, whether it's advocating abolishing the Electoral College or implementing a complex RCV system to create arbitrary rules to tip the scales to candidates they favor.
So you're mad that a candidate that had less popular support won the election in Alaska but the system where there's been one Republican popular vote winner and 3 Republican presidents in the past 30 years is sacrosanct?
Which can lead a candidate with a dedicated but small fanbase getting 30% of the vote but winning because the other side has a couple candidates running. The precise sort of problem you're currently grumping about.
Palin lost because she’s a national laughing stock and a terrible candidate. Not because of RCV. Instead of acknowledging that you are resorting to inventing nonsensical conspiracy theories that can be disproven by performing the “simple addition” you keep talking about.
I think IRV is an interesting step towards an alternative to FPTP, but as others have noted, it also has serious flaws. Condorcet methods (of which there are many) and approval voting / score voting much better, and I wish we would see more adoption of these.
I would encourage you to look at approval voting, which is as simple as FPTP (the only difference is that you can vote for as many candidates as you want, instead of just one), but produces much better outcomes.
https://ncase.me/ballot/ is a good explainer of different voting methods.
Really? Which rules and exceptions are you referring to?