“Ranked choice voting” is a misleading term for Alternative Vote or Instant Runoff Voting. There are many ranked choice voting systems and the most important is Single Transferrable Vote, which is a popular system of proportional representation.
Isn’t ranked choice just the single candidate version? Like, you don’t get proportional representation with a presidential election
You can elect multiple reps, the quota threshold is just different
Importantly you do need the multi member districts to get the full benefit of these kinds of voting systems and prevent duvergers law
I don’t remember the name of it, but I really liked the one that weighed in disapproval. It’s similar to RCV, with a very important difference.
Like standard RCV, after a count that doesn’t result in a majority of voters with the same top-ranked candidate they eliminate a candidate.
But instead of removing the candidate with the least top-ranked votes, it removes the candidate with the most bottom-ranked votes.
The result is a system that trends away from a hyper-polarized 2-party system.
The result is that name recognition and bold statements are detrimental to getting elected. The result is that the most milquetoast , no-name, do nothings are who gets elected.
I get that people are dissatisfied with the current system. That doesn’t make literally anything else better.
These alternative voting systems are not the silver bullet that people think they are.
American people don’t have a federal holiday on elections, am I right?
Edit: I didn’t mean federal holiday. Just a holiday that’s mandatory to follow even for private firms.
Makes it easier for the richer people with flexible jobs and the retirees with no jobs to vote.
3 guesses which party is always against making it a federal holiday…
But a federal holiday doesn’t really help though right? People working at Wendy’s don’t get existing federal holidays off so it wouldn’t change for the majority of people who can’t get to the polling stations because of what job they have.
Hell, they could just hold it over a weekend. Why does it need to be just one day, let alone a weekday (or more importantly, a work day)?
Utterly insane that elections are held on weekdays. I’m so thankful we have mandatory voting, easy early voting, voting by mail, elections on weekends, and protections for employees who need to vote on the day they if they’re working in Australia. We also already have ranked choice voting by single transferable vote as well as proportional representative voting in most jurisdictions (all bicameral parliaments).
Unfortunately we have a beyond-uncomfortable fraction of the population that are totally cool with trying to prevent/discourage people from voting, as long as the near term political benefit is in their favor.
But I’m still glad to hear about other governments doing things for the good of the people. One of these days maybe enough of the US population will realize we can implement things that worked in other countries!
Just have to convince them that other countries exist…
I mean even federal holidays don’t help. At least for the lower classes since businesses are not forced to follow said holidays. It may be good for federal/government workers but from the private sector it will mean very little.
But I am not talking about federal holidays. I am talking about holidays in both the private and government sector for elections. That’s a fairly reasonable/old law in many countries including mine.
Voting is not governed on the federal level. That power is reserved to the states. Most reasonable states have 30+ days of early voting. The people complaining about no federal holiday for voting have probably never voted. If your state does not have early voting then get on that shit and stop bitching online.
Having most governance at the state level is a good thing. You are 1 voice in a million instead of 1 voice in 300 million. It is easier for people to influence state government. State laws have a bigger impact on people’s lives.
If someone isn’t knowledgeable and involved in state politics but is posting online about politics then they are just another braying jackass doing nothing to fix things.
RCV does have a name recognition and a perceived ‘hotness’ that other voting systems haven’t really matched. And in politics, name recognition matters. I think it is counter productive to attack it to push another voting system. Instead, imo it makes more sense to push the alternative voting system by comparing it to FPTP, our current voting system.
Meanwhile the heritage foundation goes on and on about how this bad for freedoms lol
As a general rule anything the Heritage Foundation supports you should probably be against, but it didn’t exactly solve all problems immediately in the countries, and yes, some US states, that have it.
Good example of just how shitty and disingenuous Heritage Foundation can be:
Just a reminder to people that the Heritage Foundation are the ones propagating the horrifying "Project 2025”(
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.
