Ranked-choice voting will be used in Maine’s presidential election, court rules

Re:Ranked-choice voting will be used in Maine’s presidential... by godelski on Wednesday September 23, 2020 @02:44AM (#24563723)

I think that is a fair assessment. My big fear is that we'll implement IRV and then when we run into the next problem (let's be real, the next election) people will say "well that didn't work" and discount voting systems as being part of the solution.

I mean we've literally done this in America (though not nationally). We've had IRV before. People turned against it. So I don't think my fear is unjustified since there's historical precedent.

Australia has IRV (has for 100 years) and is still dominated by two parties even though they have the advantage of proportionate representatives through their parliamentary system. And in reality they have their two coalitions.

What worries me is that CGP and Hasan have large audiences but look to have done surprisingly little background research into the topics and alternatives. And let's be real, voting math is hard and unintuitive. It is overly constrained and there is no global optima/easy answer. I don't expect the average person to look more than surface level, but I do expect more from groups like HN.

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Re:Ranked-choice voting will be used in Maine’s presidential... by elihu on Wednesday September 23, 2020 @03:15AM (#24563953)

Yeah, that's also my take: if you introduce a weird new voting system and voters don't like it, it's not just one step in a progression of incremental reform that will eventually lead us to a smoothly-functioning democracy. Rather, voters will just demand we revert back to the old system because (as far as they can see) that fancy voting nonsense is all junk. Then we'll be stuck with FPTP until either democracy fails outright or the previous attempt at reform has been forgotten, perhaps in a hundred years or so, and someone tries again. When you're changing the basic mechanisms of voting, you don't get any do-overs.

I am optimistic that within the last couple of years, it seems that any online conversation about RCV among even moderately technical/nerdy groups of people seems to almost always include someone bringing up the downsides of RCV and the better alternatives. I used to kind of dread RCV discussion threads because I felt like I ought to explain the problems, but it's very technical and abstract. Now I usually find someone has already written what I would have said, often in a more concise, clear way.

[ Parent | on HN ]