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What is ranked-choice voting and why is New York using it?

npr.org

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Re: What is ranked-choice voting and why is New York using it?

#24

Worth considering the argument against ranked-choice voting: https://www.wsj.com/articles/ranked-choice-voting-is-second-...

Can you summarize or provide a non-paywall link?

It’s frustrating that they claim RCV is second best but (presumably) put what they argue is best below the fold.

Re: What is ranked-choice voting and why is New York using it?

#25
The really unfortunate thing about NYC's ranked choice voting is that you're limited to ranking only 5 candidates. This means you still need to engage in tactical voting.

You can't just rank the candidates you like, in the order you like them, because your genuine top 5 choices might not include the people who are most likely to win. You'll be "throwing your vote away" unless you include the most-likely-to-win candidates - that is, unless you vote tactically.

I've seen lots of discussion in NYC where people are trying to figure out the right tactical voting to do given their views and given the fact that they can only rank 5 candidates. Ranked choice voting is supposed to make tactical voting essentially irrelevant, so this is disappointing.

Re: What is ranked-choice voting and why is New York using it?

#26
We've had this in Australia since day 1 of Federation.

One important factor the article didn't quite emphasise is how this voting system can break up the two party duopoly without creating 1920s-Reichstag-esque anarchy.

It's completely normal to put a third party as your first preference, while still indicating that you'd prefer Kodos to Kang.

In practical terms, it means the Dems would actually have to do some work in order to win the black vote, and likewise for the Republicans and working class white people.

Re: What is ranked-choice voting and why is New York using it?

#27

It frankly forced me to research more candidates than I would have. The amount of familiarity I have for every e.g. City Council candidate (which were RCV) versus DA candidate (who were standard voted) is night and day.

IIRC in some applications of ranked choice voting it's possible to rank an arbitrary number of choices. So even voting the old-fashioned way would be fine.

Re: What is ranked-choice voting and why is New York using it?

#28
post #10

What's great about RCV (not IRV specifically) is that if the ballot data sets are retained, you can write software to recount them using other RCV algorithms. I'm curious when we'll next have a Condorcet Winner that isn't the IRV winner.

I don’t like rank choice voting because it can result in someone with fewer first place votes than the first or second candidate to win if the conditions are right. We’ve seen surprise results where an obscure candidate has won when too many top choices split the first choice votes and someone relegated to the floor vacuums up all the throwaway votes (people think they have to “spend” all their votes)

> an obscure candidate has won when too many top vs fixates split the first choice votes and someone relegated to the floor vacuums up all the throwaway votes

That’s the point. The compromise candidate won. If the top candidates had spent less time mud slinging they may have remained in others’ top two or three.

Re: What is ranked-choice voting and why is New York using it?

#29
post #12

Ranked Choice Voting is not really a good idea. It has very strange unintuitive behavior. Doing Score based voting is just much better and arguably simpler and less work. I specially like the Star-Voting, where they do a runoff at the end to cover some extra cases. They also have a few variants for multi-winner and representational voting. Its also much more familiar for people from real live, like online review. htt…

Do you have any data around how many people in practice rank candidates between 2 and 4 (assuming a 1-5 scale)?

Given how polarizing politics tends to be, especially in a two party system such as America, I’d wager that most people put all 5’s for candidates of their party and all 1’s for candidates of the other party.

Re: What is ranked-choice voting and why is New York using it?

#30
post #10

What's great about RCV (not IRV specifically) is that if the ballot data sets are retained, you can write software to recount them using other RCV algorithms. I'm curious when we'll next have a Condorcet Winner that isn't the IRV winner.

I don’t like rank choice voting because it can result in someone with fewer first place votes than the first or second candidate to win if the conditions are right. We’ve seen surprise results where an obscure candidate has won when too many top choices split the first choice votes and someone relegated to the floor vacuums up all the throwaway votes (people think they have to “spend” all their votes)

The whole point is to allow this. Why don't you like it?
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