Single-winner ranked ballots methods are reform theater; they aren't particularly “more fair and inclusive” that FPTP in general, and the particular method called “Ranked Choice Voting”, “Alternative Vote”, or “Instant Runoff Voting” in particular is only minimally different in structure and effect from majority-runoff.

Established elites make a show of opposing IRV/AV/RCV because centering the debate on that focusses attention there rather than on real reform, which requires systems that produce proportional results.

This statement seems to be in conflict with everything I've read about ranked choice voting. If I can put my preferred independent candidate as rank 1 and a safe choice at rank 2 then this is objectively better than just voting for the safe choice out of fear of stealing votes away and giving it to the opposition.

What systems would you prefer?

...That just degenerates to propping up the duopoly! That won't change anything.

I'm straight up against any methodology that blunts the sting of no confidence in the two big parties. They should absolutely have to react to shifting priorities. That means, no safety net. Otherwise, you're handing them the same election advantage they've always enjoyed and just handwaving the entire issue.

It sounds more to me like we need to start tracking negative votes (not this person) as well. It's bollocks that no confidence is treated as "I have no opinion".

Just wanted to chime in that all ranked voting systems can be gamed: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arrow%27s_impossibility_theore...

This is an oversimplified conclusion.

FTA:

> The practical consequences of the theorem are debatable: Arrow has said "Most systems are not going to work badly all of the time. All I proved is that all can work badly at times

Followed by:

> Although Arrow's theorem is a mathematical result, it is often expressed in a non-mathematical way with a statement such as no voting method is fair, every ranked voting method is flawed, or the only voting method that isn't flawed is a dictatorship.[11] These statements are simplifications of Arrow's result which are not universally considered to be true.

Bottom line - this seems interesting, but is hardly as simple as "all ranked voting systems can be gamed".

> Bottom line - this seems interesting, but is hardly as simple as "all ranked voting systems can be gamed"

It is almost that simple. Every deviation from the unattainable ideal in Arrow’s theorem corresponds to one or more ways that the system:

(1) can be gamed, or

(2) is insensitive to voter preferences, or

(3) changes outcomes in the opposite direction of changes in expressed voter preferences.

(And usually several from multiple categories.)

There are whole catalogs of these and enumerations of which ones apply to each voting system.

Good thing approval voting isn't a ranked voting system!

Approval voting is an unforced preference (i.e., allows ties) ranked voting system with only two ranks just like bullet voting systems (plurality and majority-runoff), differing in that it allows ties in both ranks and not just the second.

Arrow’s Theorem applies to unforced preference ranked voting systems (with or without limited numbers of preference ranks) the same way as it does to forced preference ranked systems.

Perhaps surprisingly, no, approval voting is actually a score voting system, which provides more information than a strict preference ranking.

This isn't necessarily intuitive, and our immediate impulse might be to object that 2^n-1 is less than n!, but as a quick informal illustration, note that the voting system where each voter assigns each candidate a score in [0,1] and selects the candidate who earns the highest sum from all voters fairly straightforwardly violates Arrow's theorem. Now, consider an approval vote where each voter rolls a single random number in the range [0,1) and vote for each candidate whose score exceeds their random number, and we get asymptotically the same result (but with some error bars). It turns out that scoring, even on a 2-point scale, is just a better primitive operation than ranking!

(Also, it helps that 2^n-1>n! for n=2,3, which covers a surprisingly large proportion of interesting elections.)

Nailed it.

Right, what is considered “real reform” here?

Real reform is not palatable. The correct reforms include rotating appointments on the Supreme Court, abolishing the Senate, re-apportioning the House, and changing the presidency to have significantly less power. But something like this is not achievable with the current ossification of our dysfunctional political systems in the US.

Given that, I still believe ranked choice voting is the first baby step toward more representative politics.

Yes, we also need multi-member, proportional legislative districts. https://www.fairvote.org/prcv.

Single member districts are a disgusting thing for a society that claims to be a representative democracy. As a very simple example, rural liberals and urban conservatives effectively never get represented in our government, and that's still within the context of the false dichotomy of left/right.

But single winner ranked choice voting is still important for elected positions that necessarily must be one person, like executive seats.

> But single winner ranked choice voting is still important for elected positions that necessarily must be one person, like executive seats.

Executives are neither necessarily single seat nor necessarily directly elected. When indirectly elected, the electoral body that is itself directly elected need not be elected with single-winner methods. The US, in fact, uses multiwinner elections for electing the electoral college now, though mostly using the specific method (multiseat plurality winner-take-all) whose manifest unfairness and utility in excluding minority voices is the specific reason for the existing statutory ban on multiwinner elections for Congress.

We don't need anything so complicated, we just need to return to the house and electoral college being periodically resized according to census data rather than fixed at 435. Those reversions would solve most electoral problems without even needing to touch hard issues of engineering fair an trustworthy alternative voting systems.

> Those reversions would solve most electoral problems

No, they wouldn't, as the problems (including duopoly) predate the changes you would reverse.

The population, level of urbanization, and amount of information were all far less back then. It would be a lot harder for two parties to completely control an 8000 member congress or gerrymander that many districts.

> The population, level of urbanization, and amount of information were all far less back then.

To the extent those are relevant, they magnify the problems now (with or without more districts), rather than mitigating them.

> It would be a lot harder for two parties to completely control an 8000 member congress or gerrymander that many districts.

More districts make gerrymandering easier, not harder. As does more information.

Sure, there'd be more independents (absolute count), and at least one more often, in an 8000 member House, but proportionate to the total, there'd probably be fewer, on average, than there have been with the 435 member House.

I think ranked choice voting is too nerdy for much of the general public to understand; not the principle of it but the actual practice of how to tally votes and calculate the winner. Given the choice between a voting system the public demonstrably tolerates even though it isn't mathematically fair, and a voting system that is mathematically fair but is likely to cause confusion and distrust in elections, I prefer the former.

You could change my mind by showing that ranked choice voting systems can be taught to even the most common of midwits.

I personally slightly prefer approval voting (e.g. select all candidates you like, no ranking, most votes wins). It's simpler for voters and RCV is more likely that people will be lazy and only select one choice. But it does have the problem that many people will think it violates one person, one vote.

There are municipalities and states that have implemented both. Voters handle them fine.

More importantly, a large minority of people in the US who already believe the current voting system isn't fair, so why are you afraid RCV will make it worse? I think it will be the opposite, since it is likely to cool the political polarization and encourage the election of more moderate politicians that a larger majority are ok with.

> I personally slightly prefer approval voting (e.g. select all candidates you like, no ranking, most votes wins).

Yes, I like this one a lot more.

> There are municipalities and states that have implemented both.

I think for low-stake elections that most people don't vote in anyway, experimentation is relatively safe. But I wouldn't want to try anything new with fiery federal elections, particularly not the presidential election. The risk of confusion resulting in costly civil unrest is too high.

> More importantly, a large minority of people in the US who already believe the current voting system isn't fair

Yes, but they tolerate it for the most part.

> Yes, but they tolerate it for the most part.

Arguable after the 2020 election.

For the most part. Tens of millions of people voted, a few hundred (maybe a few thousand) people rioted, and the rest are mostly just complaining. All in all, I'd say the current system is working pretty well.

Do you think that Americans are unusually stupid? Other countries manage this without any issues.

I think the most important distinction between the various scenarios is who was it that put these alternative approaches in place? Was it a consequence of public backlash and potentially against the will of the political class (which is what would be required in the US and Canada), or was it an initiative started by, or at least supported by, the political class?

Another important aspect: if the public isn't sufficiently intelligent, or isn't interested in such things, how did that state come about? Does the government play any role in setting educational curriculum? Does the media play in any role in what the public focuses on, considers important, etc?

> Do you think that Americans are unusually stupid?

A large minority of them are, yes. There's millions of people in this country that flunked their way through 12 years of math class and never retained anything more than basic arithmetic. 4% of Americans are classified as "functionally illiterate", that's 13 million people who effectively can't even read.

The point of democracy is to placate everybody, not just the smarter portion of society, so the mechanisms of democracy should be simple enough for somebody with a simple mind to understand. "Count votes and pick who got the most" is generally such a system.

District-based elections, where each district had one winner, tend to lead to two-party systems. The counting mechanism doesn't meaningfully impact this. If you want to change this, you can expand current districts to cover multiple seats. That way, second-placed, third-placed, and so on, candidates also get seats. Depending on the #seats of the district. Parties could run multiple candidates, since there are multiple seats.

For the US, districts with e.g. 5 seats would be very interesting. The effect would be two-fold: first, more distinctiveness between candidates of the same party. Extreme example: a prolife Democrat, a gun-regulation Republican running alongside more traditional candidates. Secondly, at least some candidates outside the 2 major parties will get a seat. This probably means no more majority in House/Senate, but a need to form a coalition. That means talking with each other and reaching agreement would no longer be the newsworthy exception it is today, but would be part of the very fabric of the House/Senate.

I don't see how a different counting mechanism could lead to the same effects.

I used to be a big proponent of ranked choice voting, but then I finally stepped back and realized that it doesn't seem to necessarily produce more "inclusive" or "unifying" outcomes. Change my mind.

It's a little presumptuous to come in and say "I don't believe this, change my mind." I don't think anybody is going to bother to, frankly. You ought to put in a slight amount of effort and give some modicum of evidence.

“Change my mind” is a meme. Sheesh.