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…
Democracy is an experiment. Trying out RCV may open the avenue for new systems to be tried.
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 candid…
I don't disagree it's not ideal if you have more than 5 choices you like, but let's not over criticize a small flaw without appreciating the massive progress here. I read "horrible and unfortunate" and can see how people would take that to mean "back to FPTP".
I voted today and put 3 small candidates and two who "have a chance". I'm really excited to see how those 3 candidates shake out in the rounds, and that alone might give them a lot more power next race. That's super exciting to me and I think we can celebrate that and then push to improve the issues after :)
I'm Israeli and I was recently shocked to learn the rest of the world trusts electronic voting and vote by mail. We have a very simple and strict voting process here - the key feature which builds the trust in voting is that every 4 poll workers are responsible for the integrity of only up to 800 votes. We don't have fraud allegations because you would have to blame over 150 different people simultaneously (and often much more, on the order of hundreds of people, when you take into consideration the practical constrains) to change a single seat. It's very simple to convince a person of the integrity that this process. We have a high turnout which completely contradicts the claim that mail / electronic voting increases turnout. Electronic voting / mail voting give the power of changing the results to a handful of people who control the voting machines / know the voter rolls. Whether they will or had abused it is anyone's guess - but pretending that controversy over election process is inevitable is plainly wrong. The entire premise of elections is to prove to the losing side that the process was fair, so I find it unbelievable so many countries overlook that and give things like convenience and corona safety a priority.
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.
Spoiler alert: they don't argue what's best.
Very weak evidence offered but the motivation behind the article was near the top.
"They also appeal to more ideological voters—especially on the left—by arguing that they can express their views with more precision in a ranked-choice system."
I really hate that Instant Runoff Voting, which is almost literally the worst possible voting method with ranked choice ballots, has somehow gotten the name “Ranked Choice Voting” stuck to it.
It’s like if “Democratic Elections” became a specific name for Plurality voting.
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…
Fellow Aussie and RCV-enthusiast here, but minor correction: RCV was introduced in 1918 in response to elections where a minority candidate won due to vote splitting.
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.
main points are
1. may decrease voter turnout by 5-6%
2. not as obviously fair as traditional voting
3. increases existing divides
I personally think none of them are good enough points, they can all be dealt with. And 3 just means you can vote for who you like best, not just the ones in power.
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)
> I don’t like tank [sic] 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 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…
Your last paragraph shows a lack of depth in understanding American history and politics.