When you get to the actual ballot box, it frequently becomes a "the relatively sane person needs every vote they can get to defeat the lunatic" sort of decision.
Third parties aren't going to be a real thing in the US without a change to the way we count votes.
The fact that most Americans don't seem keen/prioritized on implementing it, despite wide-scale disillusion at the two party system is mind-boggling to me.
Slavery is the original sin of the American Consitution - parties are the second sin.
How can parties be the second sin of the Constitution? The Constitution literally doesn't even envision their existence, to the point that the procedure for electing the president and vice president had to be changed to account for their existence.
I worry that a populace that can't understand "large urban counties take longer to count their many votes, leading to big vote swings hours after the polls change" and storms Congress over it will have even more challenges understanding the ranked choice setup, though.
Good enough that IMHO the benefits clearly outweigh the concerns. The beauty of the fragmentation of voting in the US, is that we can roll out different voting systems incrementally and be able to collect data on how they work without "betting the farm" on one election.
So while it can upset the first to the post strategies, thd electorate can be disappointed in the results.
I am very interested in the amount of negative sentiment to RCV in the zeitgeist and am trying to determine if it is coming from lived experience of issues with the voting system or from somewhere else....
You may disagree with that take and say it only happens sometimes. I think we can at least agree it's not settled that it results in better election cycles.
I found the discussion in the Deseret piece regarding how the result of the Alaska senatorial election seemed "unintuitive" to many voters to be very interesting! When I look at the numbers and results in that election is seems clear that the outcome is exactly what I would hope to see (and seemingly is a text-book case of RCV in action). But alas, when you deploy to production, things rarely go as planned and it is clear that I need to give more weight to the human element in all of this. Even if the results are statistically desirable, that does not mean that voters will actually feel good about the result of the election....
It works in a super intuitive way that leads to the least dissatisfaction among voters.
Interestingly though (but not surprisingly) there is a lot of anti rank choice media coverage of the process.
When I tell people my city does that, some respond with “oh that sounds terrible! I heard the news that system is so complicated and hard to run! It probably took you weeks to find out who won!?”
This disconnect between my great experience with the system and the general perception of the process much bigger than I expected.
Now we just have to ask… who benefits from pushing a bad narrative about rank choice voting
Any party that already has high likelihoods of winning the election will be hurt by RCV.
Your opposition to RCV should increase with your distance from the center. RCV reduces the chances of fringe candidates being successful. Traditional U.S. systems reduce the chances of centrists.
Most intelligent strategists prefer to lose 50% of elections than to lose 90% of elections.
No, it won't. RCV doesn’t hurt duopoly at all. It generally rewards the more centrist subfactions of whatever the two dominant factions would be without it, so if (in the USA) you views are best represented by a blend of the corporate capitalist neoliberal wing of the Democratic and the anti-Trump wing of the Republican Party, RCV is a boon for you.
If your views are not well represented in the current system, they will be even less represented with winner-take-all elections under RCV. For that, you need multiwinner elections producing proportional-ish results, whether party list, STV (the multiwinner system of which RCV/IRV is the single-winner form), MMP, or some other system.
The people in power are not incentivized to do this. Thus they convince the masses that it's a bad thing.
1. ranked choice voting (to eliminate the spoiler effect, truly opening the way for a non-duopolistic political environment)
2. open, non-partisan primaries
3. independent redistricting commissions (to eliminate gerrymandering)
Even if people agree that they don't like the two parties, it doesn't mean that they agree on the same third party. Most likely, their last-ranked choice, but it's going to be named by the most people. The winner will probably be one of those two.
I'm all for it, especially if it makes people feel heard. Maybe somebody who made a strong showing can leverage that in future elections. Perhaps there will be a few candidates who can put on strong campaigns without a party support, and that will bolster confidence.
But I predict that the most likely outcome is that people say "It's rigged and there's no difference from the old way".
In practice, ranked-choice voting means instant runoff voting, where you basically throw out candidates who didn't get enough votes until you get someone who wins. In the US, this means that it's still going to be a choice between the Democrat and the Republican, but you'll get 10% or so of the population to feel comfortable voting for $THIRD_PARTY knowing they can still express their opinion in the Democrat-Republican race. It's political placebo, except if the results are even somewhat messy, you'll get bellyaching from people who do bad statistics to say they should have won (witness the recent Alaskan election decided in this manner).
There's another set of ranked-choice voting based on Condorcet methods, which run all two-way races simultaneously and picks the candidate who wins all of their races (with different variants for handling the case who no one can do this [1]). The downside of these methods is that they're more confusing and, if you thought that instant runoff produces unclear mandates, Condorcet methods are going to render those results even less clear.
Ultimately, the ills of American politics have very little to do with its use of the first-past-the-post voting system; switching to different systems are likely to produce the exact same results [2].
[1] The most intellectually honest, IMHO, is to just declare the race at a tie in this case. I imagine that politics would be better if we were more honest about very close results indicating ties rather than pretending that it's a decisive mandate for victory.
[2] Another statistic to remember is the vast majority of people will vote for an extremist on their side of the aisle over the moderate on the other side.
I would prefer a candidate who was the first choice of 30% of Party A voters and the second choice of 40% of Party B voters over a candidate who was the first choice of 65% of Party A voters and the second choice of 2% of Party B voters.
Admittedly, RCV doesn't guarantee this, but it seems much more promising. If you can get winners that 70% of voters can live with, that seems better than the current situation. And it would change strategies dramatically. I would expect fewer appeals to mobilize extremist bases.
I think it would also make voting more granular. People would focus on individual issues more. Their first choice might look the same as today, but for their second choice should they choose the guns-rights abortionst or the gun-control pro-lifer? That second choice now impacts the election result in a meaningful way.
It's when a Condorcet winner does not exist that Condorcet compliant methods get hard to explain.
There are alternatives to IRV, almost every single one of which is better. IRV is a bolt-on plug-n-play implementation to existing winner-take-all voting for lazy bureaucrats.
Looking into the details it seems the results can't be blamed on voter exhaustion, as the Democratic candidate would have won even if all exhausted votes in the second-to-last round would have gone to the remaining Republican candidate, so I'm open to the idea that this wasn't a failure of ranked choice voting, but rather a genuine shift in Alaskan politics. Still, it doesn't seem very likely. Alaska went for Donald Trump by a comfortable margin in the 2020 elections, and a Republican hasn't lost a statewide race there since 1972 - until now. But on the other hand, it's hard to look at the election results and see how the Republican candidate could have beat the Democrat candidate in a head-to-head first-past-the-post election.
So... I don't know. Maybe people just vote differently when forced to pick between two candidates than they do when ranking candidates on a ballot with multiple choices? Perhaps the 2024 election results will bring more clarity...
[1]: https://www.elections.alaska.gov/RCV.php
[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alaska%27s_at-large_congressio...
[3]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_presidential_ele...
[4]: https://www.elections.alaska.gov/results/22GENR/US%20REP.pdf
In a hypothetical world, roughly evenly split on religion, where everyone would be pretty okay with secular tolerance, picking secular tolerance seems like the way to go. But if most people would somewhat prefer to try and force their particular religion on everyone if they can get away with it, secular tolerance will be everyone's second choice and will be discarded in the first round of voting... unless enough people recognize the dynamic and vote strategically rather than honestly, but that undermines the point of RCV.
I'll leave it to you to decide for yourself how much the real world resembles that hypothetical, but as I said it worries me.
In the next election there was an open seat for my Congress person. There were something like 5 progressive candidates, and one more conservative democrat. Of course, the progressive vote split and the conservative candidate won, even though he was probably the last choice among a majority of voters. I found that super ironic.
It gives me a LITTLE hope that this third party support is so high. It means we may have fewer "party no matter what" voters, and the politicians MAY have to actually pay attention to the people...
There are always lunatics; there'll be folks in NY who hold their nose and vote for a Democrat because the House is tight and they've heard of Lauren Boebert and Marjorie Taylor Greene. (Or for a Republican in Kansas, because they don't want AOC being in the majority. As someone pointed out elsewhere in the thread, one person's lunatic is another's hero.)
> It gives me a LITTLE hope that this third party support is so high.
It shouldn't. Look past the headline (to the first chart); polls have showed fairly consistent majority support for a third party for decades.
The reality is that politics is essentially bipartisan. The left/right divide is the core of politics and the only one that actually matters in the absence of regional independence movements. Therefore, what we see is that third parties usually struggle to differentiate themselves to voters.
This can be seen most clearly with the Lib Dems who are one of the main third parties in the UK. They tend to be used as a protest vote and few would be able to articulate what they actually believe. Arguably they believe nothing at all, as they have in the past reversed their position on core manifesto promises, fought against implementing referendum results (despite having "democrats" in the name) and so on. What do the Lib Dems actually stand for? What is the big difference between them and Labour or the Tories? It's unclear.
This doesn't mean you can't have different third parties. You can. The SNP is a clear example of a third party that grew from nothing to take over Scottish politics. But it seems that regional independence is one of the only things that is big enough to cause this, as typically the national level parties will not want to support a regional independence movement (would reduce their own power and take up a lot of time), but voting is regional.
Even there though, the SNP is basically just a clone of Labour plus that one additional policy. If Scotland were to become independent, you'd rapidly see the two party system re-establish itself there along left-wing and really-left-wing lines, because this is the only axis that matters.
In Europe where FPTP often isn't being used, you do see more parties, but this doesn't result in less partisan or more harmonious politics. If anything it seems to be slightly the opposite. Germany for example has major problems with people publicly debating whether the AfD should be banned, there are physical attacks on its members, and although PR is supposed to encourage collaboration and compromise none of the other parties are willing to work with it despite it being the second most popular party or even in some parts the first most popular party. The AfD is not particularly extreme though, and its policies aren't so different to the Republicans in many ways. This problem crops up in other European countries as well, it's not unique to Germany.
So a third party wouldn't fix anything in the USA. Nor would PR or more exotic voting schemes. People might occasionally use them as a protest vote, as they do already today, but there's no fundamental third ideology for a third party to express, and anyway who needs a new party when the two big ones are so internally democratic? Easier to take over one of them than make a new one.
One of these two subclauses has to be false, lol.
(It's the first one. The first one is false.)
The reason third parties exist in other democracies is because of whipping. In the UK, in Australia, in France, in Canada, in Germany, in Israel, the MPs are whipped.
What does that mean? That means that party representatives have to vote with their group, otherwise they run the very real risk of being evicted from that group. When was the last time that a Democrat lost their (D), have been evicted from the Democrats because they voted differently? Even now, no Democrat would get evicted from the party for voting for a Republican Speaker.
The US whips very differently, and so all the fuel of the third parties exists within the two big political families.
In a system in which parties stand for little, you don't develop third parties. But even in countries with tighter party discipline, like the UK, third parties struggle to justify their existence and stand out from the crowd.
Also, each side is voting for the person they think is more sane, so it's partially a perspective problem. There may be some people in the middle, but not enough to win a 3rd party because that 63% who support the idea of a 3rd party all envision something different.
Unless it means that those people view "their party" as being too moderate. On the left you have groups like the Green Party who view the Democrats as being too far right. On the right you have MAGAs who view Republicans as the radical left.
“Sane vs lunatic” may have been a media construction at some point, but it sure is real now.
Australian way to count votes was specifically designed to avoid favoring a two-party system (basically, instead of selecting one candidate, you vote for multiple and give your preference order). Yet in effect Australia has a 2-party system, too.
Why is that, I don't know.
Big money, I suspect.
It is my depressing realization after wondering the same thing as you and discovering that these alternate voting systems actually don't help, in the end, with electing someone to a position of singular power. They seem to help in other situations, though.
Third parties have been a thing in the US in times past but you probably need some distinct coalition of states to make one meaningful.
Yes but it was the previous duopolistic choice of incompetent-awful vs intentional-awful led us to lunatic territory.
Until it becomes the a "both people are lunatics" sort of decision....
> Third parties aren't going to be a real thing in the US without a change to the way we count votes.
Exactly. Perhaps the single most important (feasible) improvement that could be made in US politics is broader adoption of Instant-Runoff Voting! It keeps things simple, maintains single-representation, but avoids the absurdity of first-past-the-post voting.
"The United States is also a one-party state but, with typical American extravagance, they have two of them." - Julius Nyerere
- Ralph Nader and Al Gore
- Ross Perot got Bush I
- Third party candidates received around 6 million votes in 2016
First past the post voting allows only two parties: because the winner is whichever party has less competitors for it's ideological niche. It explicitly destroys any concept of a market place of ideas being possible in politics.
Do you have an example to back this up? Europe is largely multiparty and yet seems to have much more 'corporate unfriendly' consumer protections than we do today.
But it's kind of a chicken and egg problem.
The safeguards against lunacy must go well beyond the number of parties, and still might not actually work.
Fear is always more effective then hope in ensuring voters don't vote in their own interest.
If we had Condorcet voting, we would have elected much more reasonable candidates a long time ago.
Honestly, I think any voting system with an algorithm more complicated than counting simple votes will just lead to more mistrust and further empower people who want to claim election fraud. They just scream "technical solution to a social problem."
I have a feeling there's probably a contradiction at the heart of democratic politics: it needs a broad consensus to be successful, but tends to remove the mechanisms for maintaining the needed consensus amongst the people, and decays to hostile factions which will eventually destroy it.
I don't think that's true. Candidates, even lunatics, adapt their strategy to whatever the voting system happens to be. If a lunatic can win against a sane person in a two-party contest, I have no doubt whatsoever that a lunatic can also win under Condorcet with many more candidates.
Condorcet methods could help if the problem was that the preferences of people are not being met. But that is not the problem, that has never been the problem. The problem is that people do not know how to optimize their own self-interest and genuinely prefer simple narratives that tell them what they want to hear, or what the media they listen to tells them to think.
Garbage in, garbage out. Doesn't matter what the voting system is.
Look, choosing a party requires you to figure out which economic policies best spur economic growth, which ones might make the climate crisis worse, what the long term consequences of increased immigration might be, and so on, and so forth. On your time. Through the distorting lens of media. Of course the average voter can't make heads or tails of this stuff. It's not their fault. Even if they could, they wouldn't have time because they work all day.
So the best strategy the voter has is not to understand the issues, but to delegate their choice to someone they trust who ostensibly knows the issues. That's media, scientists, influencers, church leaders, etc. Regardless of the voting system, the public opinion will be modulated by the landscape of influencers they trust. If that landscape is broken, the votes will go in the wrong direction regardless of how many choices there are, I'm afraid.