MA did this last year
What is ranked-choice voting and why is New York using it?
411–420 of 476 posts
Re: What is ranked-choice voting and why is New York using it?
#412Earlier quoted context omitted.
The USA is a two-party state because of the voting system. If people could confidently vote for another party there wouldn't be just two parties. It's even reflected in the language, like how people task about being "bi-partizan" instead of "non-partizan".
> If people could confidently vote for another party there wouldn't be just two parties. If multimember districts are used with RCV yes. If not it tends to maintain a duopoly. Australia’s Senate uses RCV like voting with multimember districts and has more diversity than its House which uses single member districts. That said there is some benefit to using RCV even with single member districts as in theory it tends to…
What I like about RCV is that it benefits moderate candidates. You can also argue that moderate candates have more influence at a national level, and if your representatives have more influence they have more bargaining power on behalf of your state.
All in all RCV can be a moderating factor AND it does not require top down changes to the election system.
Re: What is ranked-choice voting and why is New York using it?
#413Earlier quoted context omitted.
> If people could confidently vote for another party there wouldn't be just two parties. If multimember districts are used with RCV yes. If not it tends to maintain a duopoly. Australia’s Senate uses RCV like voting with multimember districts and has more diversity than its House which uses single member districts. That said there is some benefit to using RCV even with single member districts as in theory it tends to…
> That said there is some benefit to using RCV even with single member districts as in theory it tends to moderate the candidates a bit as they want to appeal to more people. RCV has a bigger impact when used in conjunction with primaries. The is a not unusual situation where more extreme candidates win primaries when the more moderate candidate would have won the election by a larger margin. The more extreme candida…
Yeah. The solution there is to get rid of primaries altogether. And they’re unnecessary with RCV.
Although I think they’re unnecessary already under the current system and the US would be a lot better off without them. You could get rid of them and just leave it up to the parties themselves to decide which candidate they will back for each district via whichever means they prefer internally amongst party members.
Re: What is ranked-choice voting and why is New York using it?
#414Earlier quoted context omitted.
> If people could confidently vote for another party there wouldn't be just two parties. If multimember districts are used with RCV yes. If not it tends to maintain a duopoly. Australia’s Senate uses RCV like voting with multimember districts and has more diversity than its House which uses single member districts. That said there is some benefit to using RCV even with single member districts as in theory it tends to…
I think that RCV is at best a hack, a compromise for people who don't want to get too far from FPP. IMHO if you are electing individual people (a mayor, a US president, a city council, a US Senator) then STV is more equitable (it is pretty close to RCV if you are electing a single person). But if you are electing parties (like the US House) then MMP is a fairer solution
I see RCV and STV used interchangeably. And the way I’ve seen RCV described in the US it is just STV with a better name for easier marketing. But I may be missing some subtlety. I also prefer MMP for parliamentary systems but changing the US to use MMP is several orders of magnitude harder than implementing RCV, which can be done state by state. It can even be implanted using multimember districts without changing anything. So it gives the US the best path to a better electoral system I think.
Re: What is ranked-choice voting and why is New York using it?
#415Earlier quoted context omitted.
Oh, I agree that in the US, RCV is (unfortunately) often conflated with IRV. > I've wondered if IRV couldn't be substantially improved by using ... rather than eliminating the candidate with the least first-choice options. This is exactly the family of RCV systems -- IRV merely defines one implementation by which a winner is selected from a ranked ballot. Borda count has its own pathologies, too -- the usual cited pr…
You're right that Borda count on its own isn't a great system. Though an RCV-style system that eliminates candidates on the basis of least-Borda count would be something else. It might be better than either normal IRV or plain Borda count on their own. (Though I still think I'd rather go with approval voting or STAR.)
It sounds like you're referring to
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nanson%27s_method
and the related Baldwin's method, which, while being Condorcet methods, both fail monotonicity.
Re: What is ranked-choice voting and why is New York using it?
#416Earlier quoted context omitted.
> RCV does have some serious problems. Eliminating the candidate with the least first-place votes at each round means a high probability of rejecting compromise candidates that may be a lot of voters' second choice. Also, placing your first-choice candidate first isn't always a safe choice. RCV is non-monotonic, which means it's possible that ranking someone first might actually cause them to lose. That's weird, and…
With IRV, you can put a compromise or third-party candidate first _only if they have no chance_. In other words, it's purely symbolic. As soon as the third-party candidate starts to become competitive, the spoiler effect returns. It becomes risky to vote for your true favourite, and voters are forced to vote strategically as they do now. So IRV will not help us escape from polarized two-party politics; it will contin…
help me out here, I don't understand how the spoiler effect returns if the third party candidate becomes competitive. Wouldn't that just mean they have a chance of winning? Suppose Dave Chappelle ran in 2020 and 40% of people voted for him and they all had Biden ranked at #2. 15% rank Biden #1, and 45% rank Trump #1 with no #2 marked. Biden wins, no?
edit: found your explainer elsewhere, currently reading. edit edit: Huh, that is weird.
Re: What is ranked-choice voting and why is New York using it?
#417Earlier quoted context omitted.
In this US, you would rarely need to do any additional research. There are almost always only 2 choices - the Democratic candidate and the Republican candidate. Anyone voting for another candidate is simply saying that's who they /REALLY/ wish would win, but most people aren't willing to throw their vote in the garbage to virtue signal. That 3rd party candidate almost never has a chance at winning. Neither does the a…
If ranked voting happened everywhere at same time, the independents, who outnumber both Democratic and Republican party numbers combined, might become a force onto themselves and change everyone's assumptions on 3rd party candidates. This won't likely happen without national voting reform, but it is an interesting thought experiment.
At the very least you might given enough independents are elected, hand them the balance of power where the governing party has to deal with them to get bills passed rather than the increasingly difficult task of skimming votes from the rival party.
What you really need is a Don "keep the bastards honest" Chipp type to splinter off one of the major parties and form a viable third party with a group of like-minded moderates. Given the state of the GOP it could be time for the likes of Mitt Romney and Liz Cheney backed by operative groups such as the Lincoln Project to give it a crack.
Re: What is ranked-choice voting and why is New York using it?
#418We'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…
It's not fool-proof. In Canada in 1952, the province of British Columbia switched to a ranked ballot and it nearly ended in disaster. The ranked ballot was an attempt by the traditional Liberal and Conservative parties to keep a rising socialist party from gaining power, as they assumed no Liberal or Conservative voter would choose the socialists as their second choice. But there was so much animosity between the par…
So voters almost got what they wanted and not what established interests thought they should be allowed to have? Frightening.
Re: What is ranked-choice voting and why is New York using it?
#419What is the name of the voting system where the tabulators decide my vote for me and I get a sticker for showing up?
Re: What is ranked-choice voting and why is New York using it?
#420Earlier quoted context omitted.
The progenitor Kenneth Arrow was pretty wonkish even among economists. RCV appeals to technocrats, who like the provability of its assertions. It's also a change from tradition. People with these tendencies tend to skew left.
real technocrats know instant runoff is quite lousy. It's very unclear why this is the alternative that becomes so popular.
Why is it lousy on technocratic terms?