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RCV, in the most common form of IRV, has a problem that I think is relevant.
If we accept the truism that the appropriate compromise won't be anyone's first choice, then the very first thing IRV does is throw out any appropriate compromise, leaving it to make a decision between inappropriate options.
I think we need to be more able to pick a compromise, not less.
I'm not proposing it as a rule within any system, though, and my analysis generally holds so long as it's true a meaningful chunk of the time - it doesn't even need to be a majority of cases.
The last thing we need, seen through that lens, is a complex system where people don’t understand the results or how exactly their vote will affect those results.
And this is one of the best features of approval voting compared to any form of ranked choice!
It is, but 1) the public needs to be sufficiently convinced that all of the bookkeeping reliably determines which candidate that applies to in the face of possible error or malfeasance, and 2) sometimes there is no such candidate (cycles are possible) and what happens then can be complicated.
(And sure, ties are possible in ~any system, but if we treat cycles as ties we've made ties much more likely.)
Where you get into trouble is that not all elections have a Condorcet winner. In particular:
> The problem with Approval is that we're right back at the Faustian bargain of needing to fully support the lesser evil at the expense of your preferred option.
I think the concern raised by PaulHoule is very important. Assuming, for the sake of this particular digression, that it can be sufficiently satisfied by IRV in a context under consideration, BTR-IRV seems like an easy sell over IRV. It's like IRV, but instead of discarding the candidate with the least first place votes, you do a head-to-head runoff (looking at the rank ballots you already have) and discard the loser. Not much more complicated to understand or administer, and you can never discard a Condorcet winner (or a member of the Smith set, except in favor of another member of the Smith set).
(Approval voting also literally expresses more information about small numbers of candidates: there are 7 distinct approval ballots of three candidates, and only 6 distinct ranked ballots. In particular, it expresses more raw information about preferences between the top 2-3 candidates, which are the most important rankings in a single-victor election!)
Let's take the 3 person example and assume I like candidates A, B, C, in that order. With RCV, I would just rank them in that order. With approval voting, I might want to withold my approval for the most popular opponent to A, in order to boost A's chances of winning.
I like approval voting for large democracies because of the reasons you mention and the fact that it is very simple. Trust in the voting system is paramount for a healthy democracy, and requiring algebra knowledge to understand the how your vote is counted is counterproductive for generating such trust.
> Let's take the 3 person example and assume I like candidates A, B, C, in that order. With RCV, I would just rank them in that order. With approval voting, I might want to withold my approval for the most popular opponent to A, in order to boost A's chances of winning.
In a 3-candidate election, the bullet vote for A is not a strategic ballot, it honestly expresses your preference A > B,C. It would be strategic to vote A,C (instead of A,B,C), but it turns out that in elections of up to 3 (relevant) candidates, one of the honest ballots is always optimal.
(This is not to dismiss the impact of voting "for A" vs "against C", because that does matter. But there's a real trade-off there if you aren't fully informed on other voters' (adversarial!) ballots to discourage being the first to actually run that campaign unless you're sure you have a genuine majority.)
also see the "no math skills" argument.
https://alaskapublic.org/2024/05/29/ranked-choice-voting-tha...
Gamesmanship: Alaska is a red state. Only RCV would result in a Dem being elected.
https://www.wsj.com/opinion/alaska-ranked-choice-voting-mary...
(not on archive, sorry. Here's the relevant part)
Republicans have learned from what happened last time, when they remained split. Looking only at first-choice votes in the 2022 special election that Ms. Peltola won, she had 40.2%. The GOP’s contenders, Sarah Palin and Mr. Begich, had 31.3% and 28.5%, respectively. Under the RCV rules, Mr. Begich was eliminated, and his supporters were reshuffled to their subsequent preferences. Enough of them didn’t like Ms. Palin that the victory went to Ms. Peltola, with 51.5%.
Strangely, though, this result was sensitive to the order of elimination, meaning that the final No. 1 depended on who was the initial No. 3. If Ms. Palin had been dropped instead, a strong majority of her ballots would have gone to Mr. Begich, who would have beaten Ms. Peltola.
Not only that, he’d have won about 52.5%, a bigger victory than Ms. Peltola’s ranked-choice majority. Doesn’t that seem . . . odd? What if some Democrats ranked Ms. Palin first on their ballots to ensure that the most polarizing GOP opponent made the final round?
But what's a better voting system that would have achieve the presumably optimal outcome here (the less-polarizing GOP candidate Begich getting elected)?
If we just compare to simply plurality voting, the outcome seems the same: Peltola got the highest vote of the 3, so in regular FPTP voting, she would have won. Or if we compare to FPTP party-based elections as is normally done in the US, I think again it would have been the same: the GOP vote was split between Palin and Begich, and presumably Palin would have narrowly won that party's primary, and then enough GOP voters hated her enough to list Peltola 2nd-choice in the RCV, so presumably they would have also voted for Peltola in a regular party-based election, so again the outcome would have been the same.
If anything, I think this shows that these multi-candidate elections have odd-looking results when there's uneven numbers of candidates for the different parties. If there had been 2 DNC candidates, this might have played out quite differently. But maybe not: in this particular election, one of the candidates (Palin) was extremely polarizing and many voters truly hated her, but she had enough support from the right-leaning voters to get a majority on that side, over the more moderate Begich. But that was unique to the GOP side; there's no reason to think that the left-leaning voters of Alaska would have similarly voted in high numbers for an extremely polarizing candidate like AOC: Alaska just doesn't have many far-left voters the way some other states do. So it seems like the right outcome may have been reached here, because so many GOP voters in Alaska are willing to support a very extreme and polarizing candidate, rather than a more moderate one: they ended up making themselves irrelevant.
One I don't think gets talked about enough is approval voting. Vote for as many candidates as you like, whoever gets the most votes wins. Voting for all of them is effectively the same as voting for none of them. It also has the massive benefit for the general population that it's simple to explain. Even gives third-party candidates and moderate candidates a real chance at winning, since no one would feel like they're throwing their vote away by including them.
You are assuming that a multi-party, multi-candidate election is a desirable norm. But that needs to be proven by you, not assumed.
In a pre-RCV system, the parties would choose their candidates, however they do it, and then the general election would pit one candidate of each party against each other, plus whatever other parties qualify for the ballot. The public has not accepted that that must be eliminated. It did make things hard for third parties, but so it goes. Prove that that's a bad thing.
RCV will be on the ballot this fall in Ruby Red Idaho. Let's see what happens.
> You are assuming that a multi-party, multi-candidate election is a desirable norm.
Easy. Both Trump's and Biden's approval numbers are both in the toilet. Yet they both easily won their primaries.
That seems like the problem with politics as a whole these days.
Also: thinking that a few paragraphs on Hacker News constitutes sufficient wisdom is another problem with "politics as a whole." It is not going to convince you no matter what I or anyone else says.
Do some research. That probably means reading some books, hate to warn you.
Some argue that our current voting system creates the two party system we all know and hate. Derek from Veritasium did a video about this the other day. Really good stuff.
No need to come to Palin's or the Republican's defense here. Candidates are more than capable of trying to campaign for the second place votes.
https://www.ipsos.com/en-us/most-americans-are-dissatisfied-...