Re:What is ranked-choice voting and why is New York using it?
by elihu on Wednesday June 23, 2021 @03:31AM
(#27601811)
> I simply don't get why the person preferring A doesn't rank A first.
Well, that's kind of the point of the example. A normal person who wants A to win would put A as their first choice. But doing that can actually cause their preferred candidate to lose, which is exactly the opposite of the voter's intent. FPTP has a different set of problems that one could argue are worse, but one of the few good things about FPTP is that you can't say about some election result "that candidate lost because I voted for him/her".
Non-monotonic results don't happen in every election, but they're something that can happen.
In reality most preferential voting schemes have many candidates, and there's too much chaos to coordinate this kind of scenario.
Meanwhile plurality voting has candidates winning with way less than 50% of the vote, and claiming some mandate from god.
The sooner we ditch FPTP the sooner we get to something like Condorcet, or STV with multimember districts.