The only people that it’s confusing for are those who fear a 3rd part option. Preference 1, preference 2 preference 3 is all the end voter needs to know. If they can handle the myriad of different ballot formats out there that’s not asking too much
Yep. I have three brothers. My dad used ranked choice voting for us when we were kids all the time on “flavors” of things we needed to buy: ice cream, candy, toothpaste, etc. We understood it with no issues.
it was amusing seeing the look on a friend’s face when my dad would barge into the room with 5 different toothpastes and ask, “which of these do you like the best?” Followed shortly by “which of these do you like 2nd best?”
Next step should be universal mail in voting. Ranking 3 or more choices per contest will make voting take twice as long or more and it will discourage people from voting when they see lines wrapped around the building.
I’m actually surprised we don’t have more in the way of e-voting somehow. We file countless sensitive docs online each day including tax returns, and outside of the occasional technical glitches we don’t hear of massive complaints of fraud the way people go on about it with elections regardless of in person or by mail. Yeah, putting it all online has its risks, but it shouldn’t be impossible.
For most any sensitive document multiple parties can maintain their own copies and even encrypt them if they feel like it and there’s plenty of ways to verify their authenticity. This can’t as easily be applied to voting because you also want anonymity. Cryptographic systems do exist to provide a high level of confidence in integrity and anonymity but misapplication of any step of the process can completely ruin the entire thing. This happens in computer systems all the time. Seemingly secure programs suddenly have massive holes because a new exploit was discovered.
Paper systems are much more difficult to exploit or foul up. Obviously election mishaps happen all the time but I haven’t heard of any such that would alter an outcome AND do not get caught prior to certification.
