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Alaska’s ranked choice repeal measure fails by 664 votes
(alaskapublic.org)
Nice! I hope RCV continues to spread
This election was a massive loss in general. Only alaska and DC voted in favour and a half dozen others voted against and to ban.
That is disappointing. At least some places are wins.
I still wish more alternative voting systems were being considered. RCV is the conversation-dominating option, but it's a far cry from the best, and I'd much rather Score or Approval Voting got passed than RCV basically anywhere.
I haven't looked too deep into all the options, but from my view they all have advantages and disadvantages. At the very least RCV is better than what most places in the US. Riding the wave of popularity might be the only way to get things changed too.
RCV is definitely better than FPTP, but basically everything is. From what I've seen, the only thing mathematically worse than what we have now would be a random pick.
I strongly prefer Approval because ranked voting systems in general tend to have glitches. Unranked ones still suffer from issues due to strategic voting, but no moreso than their ranked counterparts. From there I prefer Approval to Score and others simply because Approval is easy to explain ("vote for as many as you want instead of just one" — there you go, one sentence!) and thus easier to sell to people who don't understand it.
Still though, there's a lot of options for sure. If you're interested in learning more, there's a couple of interactive articles about voting systems I came across (one while writing this comment); this first one by Nicky Case is a great starter, and this followup by Jameson Quinn gives a bit more detail for some stuff, particularly about strategic voting.
Thank you for sharing these links. I was a proponent of IRV, but it's clear to me now that it doesn't offer a significant improvement over FPTP. Quinn's 3-2-1 scoring method is a lot more attractive to me now.
Thanks for the info. I had read the Nicky Case summary previously but not the Jason Quinn one. I'll check it out after work today, but from how I read it Nicky's conclusion is we need to try thing is real world scenarios. Honestly I am down for any alternatives, and agree that approval would be better than RCV. I think there is a situation where you can pass some kind of election reform like RCV, see if it works, then either vote for a new method or keep it based on the real world info. Well, I see that situation as previously possible. I'm really not sure what the next 4 years will bring, but I do know what they've said they want to do, so...
Why such a close margin? What don't Alaskans like about RCV?
If I remember correctly one of the first major elections using RCV resulted in the person who overall got the most first choice picks losing the person who overall get the most second and third choice pics. So it worked as designed in that the winner was the person with over 50% of the vote, but it really upset all the people who had supported the person who would have won under the previous first past the post system.
I don't think that makes sense. In both RCV and FPTP, if a candidate gets over 50% in the first round then they're the winner. In FPTP if no candidate gets over 50% then there's usually a runoff. I believe that's why rank choice voting is also known as instant runoff voting.
Some jurisdictions using FPTP may do a runoff if there's no winner with a 50% mandate, but most do not. Split votes such as 45/40/15 with 45% declared the winner can and do happen.
I just found this article that I think explains what happened. In a previous RCV election, the Republicans got 60% of the first round vote, but still lost. That was because it was split between more than one Republican as a result of their unusual primary election system that sends the top four candidates to the general election. Basically, they spoiled the election for themselves. The tight result of this referendum is probably more of an indictment of Alaska's top four primary system than RCV.
Ah, thanks for finding the facts. So the first election had a surprise result. It worked exactly as designed, and either people didn't understand that could happen or they've since been convinced it was contrary to what they wanted.
Given the whole goal of RCV is that outcomes are satisfying to the largest number of people you'd think this result wouldn't have had a backlash like what we've seen.
I'd bet the losing party was behind the measure, and I'm somewhat happy to see it fail. I hope that means the majority of people were in fact satisfied.
this post was submitted on 21 Nov 2024
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