This is the best summary I could come up with:
Advocates say ranked choice voting could help take some of the toxicity out of American politics while giving voters access to a broader swath of ideas.
“A lot of voters are frustrated with the status quo in politics, and this method is not a huge change,” said Deb Otis, who oversees research and policy at FairVote.
“If a legitimate third-party challenge happens this year, all of the other voters in all the other states are going to have a really hard time with that, trying to navigate what to do, trying to play the strategist and figure out how to make our votes most impactful without harming our own side.”
But Jason Snead, of the Honest Elections Project, also told NPR that ranked choice makes voting more confusing, which isn’t what the U.S. needs at a time when many voters are already sitting out of the democratic process.
Jacobs, of the University of Minnesota, co-wrote a paper poking holes in a number of claims ranked choice advocates have made about the voting system.
She’s optimistic about the potential of ranked choice voting to improve representation in the U.S., but at the end of the day, any real transformative change to the political system will only come from higher voter turnout.
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It’ll never work…
At least not until we flush all the moderates out and replace them with progressives who actually want to give the people what they ask for.
Moderates know the main reasons they get votes is they’re not Republicans.
In the current system that means they get the vote of everyone left of republicans. They just have to win the primary, and as the party has argued in court: the primary isn’t a real election and they can influence it as much as they want, because at the end of it, they don’t even have to abide by a primary’s results.
In RCV that means they get ranked slightly above a Republican, and unlikely to win any elections anywhere.
So they’ll oppose it just to maintain their existing power.
Before we can fix America, we need to fix the Democratic Party. Then fight the Republicans
Moderates make up 85% of the population. Are you saying you want to remove access to vote for the vast majority of people to support your tiny minority views?
Moderates make up 85% of the population
What?
For that to remotely have a chance at being true, then you’re counting a sizable amount of Republicans as “moderates”.
A claim like that really needs a source
Are you saying you want to remove access to vote for the vast majority of people to support your tiny minority views?
Clearly not…
That would only make sense if you first claim was factual, which it isn’t. And even then, clearly wasn’t what I was saying…
Far Left make up about 5%, Far Right are 10%, Moderates (everyone else) make up 85%
Gallop says 81% make up the middle. Far Right 9%, Far Left is 7%, and Moderates 81%. There are no conservatives or liberals anymore. They are all Moderates now compared to the Progressives and Fascists on the two ends.
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.
“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.
You’ll have to run a better campaign than Massachusetts did when they tried to get it.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2020_Massachusetts_Question_2
I don’t see what kind of campaign issues they had from this link. Was it just that it was only seemingly endorsed by left leaning groups?
I mostly meant the fact that it lost.
But there really wasn’t a campaign to speak of. There were some commercials and signs against it (some nonsense about how ranked choice wasn’t really choice, it didn’t make any sense), but I don’t remember seeing anything from the pro side.
It was like they just expected everyone to know it was the better option and didn’t bother to campaign.
I live in MA, voted for this, and was seriously confused when it lost. Not enough education about it and too much stupid fear mongering, I assume.
Their neighbor to the north—Maine—successfully passed it, but guess which party has been trying to revoke it or stymie it at every turn?
