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this post was submitted on 14 Sep 2023
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While I'm extremely critical of Ranked Choice, I'll admit elections using it are largely immune to one single attack that Republicans love, the Ralph Nader.
They fund someone who sounds great to the more fickle parts of the left, knowing that the candidate is completely unable to cross over into mass appeal, all so that the spoiler will siphon votes off of the main Democratic candidate, thus allowing the Republican candidate to win with less than 50% of the vote.
In that one scenario, Ranked Choice easily performs better than First Past the Post.
In almost every other scenario, it's either a tie for just as shitty, or sometimes it's actually worse than FPtP.
Still, I seriously doubt that the people pushing for the repeal here are that concerned about the other areas where Ranked Choice falls flat as a voting system. They hate it because somehow a Democrat won.
Which, sadly, might have come about because of one of the areas where Ranked Choice falls flat as a voting system. See, the more candidates you have in a Ranked Choice election, and the closer to viability they are in relationship to each other, the worse the system performs. Especially in elections that force you to rank all candidates.
See, Ranked Choice advocates tell you that if your first choice is eliminated, your vote goes to your second choice. This is only true in the first round.
If your second choice is eliminated before your first choice is, your vote skips your second choice and goes to your third. Or your fourth, or if there are no more candidates on your ballot because they didn't last as long as your first choice did, your vote is just thrown out.
If your second choice is the most popular candidate but just needed one more first round vote to stay in the election and win everything, it doesn't matter. They've been booted in the first round and are gone.
There's more wrong with Ranked Choice, but ballot exhaustion and the screwiness of the eliminations is a big one.
A system that does not have these problems is STAR. It was actually designed as a voting system by people who study elections and human behavior.
The system is easy. You get a ballot. You rate each candidate on a scale of 0-5. How many stars? That's it for the voter.
The counting is easy as well. Count how many stars each candidate got. The top two then go head to head on each ballot. If I rated Bob at 5 and Joe at 4 because I like both, but Bob more, Bob gets the vote.
The zero is important here, because there are candidates that you'll hate and refuse to support at all, even with a 1 star, and candidates that you'll hate just slightly less if it comes to it.
You can rate two people the same. In the second round, that's counted as "no preference".
Anyway. That got a bit long, but voting systems are something I tend to care about.
I always tell people rcv is best when there are 3 candidates and only 2 are viable.
You can safely vote for someone who is definitely going to lose and keep the status quo
If you want a voting system that encourages the emergence of new parties then you must be able to vote for people equally and you must be able to indicate significant preference between one candidate and another
Something like ranked round robin can also cover it but I think STAR is more intuitive