I think the bigger shame would be to spend so much effort promoting RCV, only to have people become jaded and disillusioned with voting method reform in general when they realize RCVs many glaring problems.
The biggest problem with RCV IMO is that it looks like it eliminates the spoiler effect, but it really only eliminates it in simple cases where the third-party candidates are not competitive. This suddenly becomes very obvious and painful in cases like Burlington, 2009 or Alaska, 2022 where voters were told "RCV is great because you can vote honestly", only to realize post-election that this was entirely false, and that they threw away their votes and let the election go to a candidate they despise.
Trust is extremely important in political movements, and very easy to lose. I fear RCV is going to poison the well for any FPTP alternatives for a long time to come.
But all the voting methods have glaring problems, and every method is going to result in people complaining after their preferred candidate loses but would have won using another method.
RCV isn't going to poison the well any more than other systems. STAR voting and approval voting, for example, open themselves up to the criticism that voting itself becomes a subjective process, which could "poison the well" even more. When people have to worry about what it means to give a 3 vs a 4 to a candidate, or whether to approve 1 or 2 or 3 people?
Ranking candidates is an objectively accurate statement of preference (in contrast to STAR/approval which are subjective), and while instant runoff isn't perfect, it's easy to understand and doesn't result in absurd outcomes or people not understanding how to vote.
You can criticize RCV for sure, but if you want to defend another method, you have to show how its drawbacks aren't even worse.
I mean, I realize this is somewhat subjective, but "more people ranking a candidate first can cause them to lose" seems like a pretty absurd outcome to me.
I'm not saying approval voting is perfect either, sure it has flaws, but at least it doesn't violate the monotonicity criterion (or a variety of other important criteria that RCV fails to satisfy).
From a voter perspective, monotonicity and favorite betrayer seem to be two of the most important factors when determining "absurd outcomes." At least in my opinion.
If approval voting reduces to bullet voting in heated contests, I don't see that as very bad: to put it crudely, it's just the cost of doing business with that particular voting method, but there's nothing to say the results are compromised as a result. What would be way, way more troubling for the general public is being able to say "but that candidate was the clear favorite, why did the runner-up get the seat?" after the votes are counted. RCV has real, provable problems that will (and have!) create social unrest and a skepticism of the election's results when something like the monotonicity criterion is violated, not to mention the spoiler effect is not completely eliminated under RCV.
Further I believe bounded rationality can be applied here and very many people would still take the approach of filling in more than one bubble even in "strategic" settings, because people aren't perfect rational utility-maximizing agents, and anyway I don't see an acute disadvantage of using approval voting if that's the biggest gripe people seem to have about it.
In short: think of elections in a more 21st-century-Nobel-winner sense, not in a rote 20th-century-econ-professor sense.
It sure does seem absurd, and so thankfully there's no case where RCV does that! :)
There seems to be a lot of misinformation thrown around about this, where people seem to be conflating different issues.
I'm not sure what your source is, but you might be misunderstanding the Favorite Betrayal Criterion... which seems counterintuitive at first but isn't really. There's a lot of noise made about the fact that moving a non-preferred candidate higher than your preferred candidate can help your preferred candidate to win... but it's actually because you're ranking your preferred candidate's main opponent even lower in the process. And also it's basically impossible to do strategically because you'd need to know how everybody else voted first.
End of story, there's nothing absurd about cadidate A winning, but if some people downranked that candidate from 2nd to 3rd rank, then that candidate would lose.
https://electionscience.org/library/monotonicity/ has examples of exactly that.
Score voting methods like star voting and approval voting are objectively superior.
I’d love to see an actual paper of the methodology of VSE (the FAQ is less complete than I would like, but helpful in that it shows lots of problems – for instance, while the brief description claims VSE tests elections with “voters who cluster on issues in a realistic way”, none of the descriptions of the different voter models mentions any tie to any empirical research on how voters actually cluster, instead it simply models three different, apparently chosen because of intuitive/aesthetic appeal, empirically ungrounded, abstract ideals); there are several dimensions of it which seems quite subjective/arbitrary rather than objective, making its conclusions also arbitrary, and, worse, it seems to simply ignore known effects like cultural differences in applying rating systems without concrete grounding (which effects both score-based and limited-ranks systems, but not particularly forced-preference or vote-for-one systems.)
See the references on https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_utility_efficiency
From https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/what-democrats-win-in-a...
> 40 percent of voters had chosen Peltola as their first choice, 31 percent had chosen Palin and 29 percent had chosen Republican businessman Nick Begich III. Under the rules of ranked choice voting, Begich — as the candidate with the fewest first-choice votes — was then eliminated, and his votes were redistributed to whomever his voters ranked second.
> Unsurprisingly, most of Begich’s votes (50 percent) went to his fellow Republican, Palin. But an impressive 29 percent went to Peltola, and 21 percent were “exhausted,” meaning there was no second-choice pick, and the votes were essentially thrown out. That combination was enough for Peltola to win. While Palin gained more votes from the redistribution than Peltola did, Peltola was starting from a higher total, and receiving 29 percent of Begich’s votes was enough to keep her ahead of Palin. In the end, Peltola received 51 percent of the votes counted in the final round, while Palin received 49 percent.
Sounds fair to me. Some of Begich’s voters expressed a “Begich or nobody” preference. Many Begich voters expressed a “Peltola over Palin” preference. It’s not clear to me why pairwise preferences are meaningful, they don’t encode nuances like the above.
The objection about the spoiler effect is confusing to me. I see that there are certain situations where ex post, you get some weird outcomes where _hypothetically_ ranking your preferred candidate lower would have helped your candidate. But I don't think it's possible to identify these cases ex ante, and I don't see how they can in practice affect anyone's voting strategy. (Though maybe it's enough to get bad press like https://electionscience.org/commentary-analysis/rcv-fools-pa...?)
I think you can spin these technical narratives like "you threw your votes away because, if there had been a head-to-head it would have gone differently". But taking a simple explanation of what happened like the above, it's hard for me to see why the result is actively unfair.
In a primary system, Begich doesn't even get to the general. So it becomes Palin against Peltola.
Begich can only win in a head to head matchup in a general election against any single candidate. He cannot beat the field, because he is consistently someone's second choice in the overall field.
With a cardinal ballot such as score or STAR, your argument could potentially hold water because we can glean the nuanced preferences from people's ballots. eg if someone ranked Palin 5, Begich 4, and Peltota 0, that's a very different story from Palin 5, Begich 1, Peltota 0, even though both of those ballots would look identical if they were squished into a ranked ballot format. The second case would support your argument pretty solidly since the voter didn't like Begich much at all, just a smidgen better than Peltota.
For the opposite scenario, consider if this race had been done with a 5 point score/STAR ballot where 40% voters give Palin 5, Begich 4, and Peltota 0, 40% voters give Peltota 5, Begich 4, and Palin 0, and 20% voters give Begich 5. It would be inexcusable not to elect Begich. Even though Begich was not the first choice for 80% of the population, an election like that would indicate such extremely strong support for him that you'll probably be inclined to point out that such an election would never happen in reality and I'm giving a contrived example. Which you're right, I'm not saying this is a likely scenario, I'm simply trying to illustrate how a compromise candidate could in fact be very strong, but RCV will still eliminate them if they don't have enough first choice votes. Placing a premium on people's first choice votes as RCV does is both unwarranted given the data represented on the ballots as well as harmful due to the issues it causes with monotonicity, not electing the Condorcet winner, etc.
If we want to insist on ranked ballots, we should be using a Condorcet method to count them.
Democratic second choice votes for Begich only exist because Democrats would prefer him to Palin. They don't want him so much as don't want her. And if they can't get Peltola, they much rather have Begich.
The only reason there's noise about Peltola's win and RCV is because she's a Democrat. Look at all the hubbub being thrown about trying to say Begich should have won. You'd rather the person who came in third in the general win. And don't think people wouldn't complain about that.
STAR is RCV/IRV with extra steps that doesn't scale.
There was a time, not too long ago, that both parties could accept losing an election. I'd like to see that come back.
> Peltola beat the field. In a FPTP system, she would have just won.
FPTP sucks and does not elect representative winners, that's exactly why we need to get rid of it. RCV is just iterated FPTP and as such, carries a lot of the same baggage and problems (while adding a lot of complexity and other new problems).
> He only wins when you eliminate all other choices except one opponent
No, this is exactly backwards. Begich is the only one in this race that can win without artificially eliminating someone (which is what RCV does by ignoring lots of information on the ballots). Peltota can only win by eliminating Begich as Begich wins in the head to head, in order to get this win lots of votes that voters expressed have to be discarded.
> Democratic second choice votes for Begich only exist because Democrats would prefer him to Palin. They don't want him so much as don't want her. And if they can't get Peltola, they much rather have Begich.
That's exactly the point, the voters farthest to the right prefer Begich to Peltota, the voters farthest to the left prefer Begich to Palin, and there's a few people in the middle who prefer Begich to both. Begich was the best candidate considering the whole field of preferences - admittedly a weak compromise candidate for some, but a strong compromise candidate for others and the first choice for many (and as I mentioned before, we can't know how many consider Begich a weak compromise vs a strong compromise candidate, anything you say about the sizes of those groups is just your personal speculation).
> The only reason there's noise about Peltola's win and RCV is because she's a Democrat. Look at all the hubbub being thrown about trying to say Begich should have won.
For some people, sure, but for those of us actually trying to push for positive change this has nothing to do with democrats or republicans. This has to do with RCV not electing the condorcet winner and having a non-monotonic election.
> You'd rather the person who came in third in the general win. And don't think people wouldn't complain about that.
Yes I would, if they win the head to head vs everyone else. You're still treating FPTP like some kind of gold standard. Sorry but that's not a good metric.
> STAR is RCV/IRV with extra steps that doesn't scale.
STAR has exactly 2 steps, a summation step and then a step to compare the top two winners. RCV is a whole iteration process and thus a lot more complex and a lot less scalable. STAR is also precinct summable, whereas RCV requires tallying in a central location which is another thing which makes RCV much less scalable.
You are trying to redefine "the field" to make it mean something not quite the same.
I'm not disagreeing that FPTP is bad. It forces us into these consolidated party situations. But the field is EVERYONE. At the same time. And you ask the voters, "Which one you like the most?" And that answer, in this case was Peltola. So Peltola beats the field. With a plurality, yes, but no one has a better plurality.
I'm not defending FPTP or treating it like a gold standard. But at the very least, the person who came in last in the general should not win the election. He's people's most second choice because for both groups where he is the second the second choice, it's only because they absolutely do not want the last person.
It's less, "He's a moderate I can live with" and more "At least he's not X". Where X is either a Democrat or Palin.
Republicans wanted a have your cake and eat it too moment. They were the ones who went with this process every step of the way until the second it gave them a result they didn't like. They kinda know that crazy wins primaries. But crazy also loses the general. So they tried to bank on getting Democrats to do the work for them. But the plan failed, because there were enough people that just like Peltola on her own.
RCV/IRV is fine. It's not perfect, but it's far better than FPTP and the results are rarely counter-intuitive.
STAR requires you to give a 0 to 5 to every candidate. The end result of the scores look a lot like RCV but with ties. Not to mention, every 0-n scale system devolves into essentially Y/N as people quickly glom onto the notion that they're the values that matter the most.
You can call STAR "two step" if you ignore the actual voting portion. That's the part that makes people work harder just to essentially rank their preferences.
Because in your scenario, all of those people have to prefer gaining their religious theocracy to such the degree that they're willing to lose practicing their religion at all to get it.
It's reductio ad absurdum.
It sounds like the real problem here is education, which will be a challenge with any different voting system, and some a lot more so.
It will probably be better the next time around.
https://news.yahoo.com/sarah-palin-instructed-supporters-not...
Apparently some were instructed not to make a second choice.
It's not even that strong -- it's outcomes where ranking your second-most preferred candidate above your preferred one will help get that second-most preferred candidate elected, as opposed to a third one you detest -- if you know your most preferred candidate won't be elected.
Which makes sense, of course. But it's also "cheating" to manipulate the system if those aren't your actual preferences, and it wouldn't even work in practice because you'd have to know how everyone voted in the first place to know if it was worth it.
You're right, it seems fair to me too in this instance.
The opposite strategy would be like if Trump supporters voted for Warren to advance the weaker candidate against their guy.
The same strategy works in any kind of runoff method including instant runoff voting.
Now don't get me wrong, as a Democrat there is a part of me that is happy Peltola won, but this was clearly a pretty messed up outcome given that Begich was the condorcet winner and that Alaska is a very red state. Republicans are right to be upset about the way this election played out.
Now obviously FPTP also has the possibility of spoiler candidates, but at least in that case it's pretty easy to understand the situations in which you might be throwing away your vote. Do you think most of those Palin voters had any idea that they could have elected Begich by voting strategically? Complex, opaque voting systems like this are super bad for democracy IMO.
When Begich came out as the loser, every one of the votes he got went to the voter's #2 choice which was either Palin or Peltola (and a surprising 29% of Begich voters had Peltola as their #2 choice!)
The only people who "threw away their say in the outcome" are the ones who didn't rank their preferences. They basically opted out of having a vote if their one chosen candidate didn't win by not making a #2 choice.
It's very clear with ranked choice voting when you might be throwing away your vote, it happens only when you don't specify who your vote should go to if your first pick doesn't have enough supporters. Every single person who selected a #1 and #2 choice had a say in the outcome of that election.
And your second pick, and your third pick... right?
A big reason for electoral reform is to encourage a wider range of candidates to run, which means voters may be faced with having to come up with a total ordering across a dozen different options.
You seem to be saying that voters who aren't informed enough about their relative preferences for all available candidates, deserve to have their votes thrown away, or at least that voters who can remember an ordering for a list of a dozen names should be given more electoral power than their fellow citizens who cannot manage that feat.
That's maybe not the biggest distortion and potential unfairness in the US right now (with the electoral college and partisan gerrymandering being two aspects that courts openly accept, not to mention other more insidious methods of disenfranchisement) but I think that reform advocates need to be careful not to support the equivalent of "literacy" tests, which have a disturbing past.
Not at all, if we get to the point where people are having to choose between and rank 50+ different candidates I might agree there's a problem, but a handful of choices simply isn't. In the Alaska election they had just three to rank, since the primary weeded out the most unpopular others right away. There's also nothing to stop someone from bringing in a list of names and ranks compiled ahead of time. No need to keep your preferred ranking in your head. These days you could pull out your phone while in the voting booth, or have a small slip of paper in your wallet, purse, or pocket.
This might surprise you, but many many people aren't terribly informed about the candidates and still manage to cast a vote under our current system. This is especially true for local offices. That subset of the population can continue making poorly informed choices about a few more candidates than usual without much trouble.
I do appreciate that you're looking out for the rights of the illiterate voting population, but there's never been an easier time for illiterate people to get informed. Nearly half of the research into a particular candidate I do these days is in the form of youtube videos and radio interviews. It's admittedly slower than reading, but I do feel like I get a lot of information about a person by seeing and hearing them speak. Come voting day there are already poll workers prepared to assist illiterate voters with casting their vote as well and none of that will change under ranked choice voting.
You're completely right about the possibility of bringing a slip of paper, and I was probably over-estimating the scale of the burden there. I would like to point out, though, that we really don't want to normalize the idea of people bringing out their phones while in the voting booth, as that seems like a way to encourage vote buying or coercion (even though the victim/voter may have ways to circumvent this problem, and even though phones aren't the only way someone could take a camera into a voting booth).
> This might surprise you, but many many people aren't terribly informed about the candidates and still manage to cast a vote under our current system.
In fact that doesn't surprise me, as I was already aware of this fact, but I see it as an existing limitation of democracy that shouldn't be made any worse. The simpler and less ambiguous the question on the ballot paper, the more of an even playing field there is for all voters. I used to think that to maximize the chances of finding the optimal winner, an election should try to demand that voters enter as much information as possible on their ballot paper, but my view has completely changed on this. Even under FPTP, the election algorithm is being fed with thousands of bits of information, and the output only needs to be roughly 1 or 2 bits of information, so there is no harm in making the ballot papers as uninformative as voters are uninformed (as long as the algorithm encourages honest votes, and combines them fairly).
> there's never been an easier time for illiterate people to get informed.
I agree, but my reference to "literacy" tests was meant to convey the fact that supposed literacy tests have in practice been used as pretences to exclude voters who were likely to vote for a party other than the one administering the test. As such, my objection wasn't that illiteracy itself was a major problem, but that any unnecessarily complicated process could be seen as having a disenfranchising effect, which would undermine confidence in elections even if the effect were not significant, or be used as an argument to prevent the adoption of the reform before it was even used, either by people who genuinely care or by concern trolls. Anyway, for completeness, here is an example of a literacy test issued by the state of Louisiana:
https://www.ferris.edu/HTMLS/news/jimcrow/question/2012/pdfs...
Palin voters didn't get their second choice preferences counted. If they had instead tactically/ insincerely ranked Begich first, he would have won by a 5% majority against Peltola. They were punished by voting sincerely for Palin.
Palin was a spoiler. People who voted for her threw away their vote, period.
If you want to argue that there should have only been one republican on the ballot to prevent a 'spoiler' you'd have to take that up with the republican party
But they forgot one crucial thing: people. Even within the party, there are members and candidates others can't stand. And if you're going to give people choices, you have to be prepared for them to make choices you don't agree with.
You don't get to rank a bunch of choices and then claim your vote didn't get counted because every one of your choices didn't win the election. People who picked Palin as their #1 choice won against Begich. Their vote went to Palin exactly as they wanted. Palin lost, but the voter who put Palin first voted for the person they wanted and that vote was counted.
Voting for a losing candidate does not mean throwing your vote away or not having your vote counted.
People are used to casting ballots for their main choice, and if pressed I doubt most of the electorate would be able to describe the instant runoff process RCV enabled and you would be hard pressed to find a layman able to flesh out all the different scenarios of how their ballot would be counted in any particular close race.
Many voters don't have a preference for the people they vote for now. Many really do tend to fall back on voting for a party, and that option doesn't go away with RCV. I do suspect it'd be better (and easier) for each party to put forward only one candidate in each election, but as long as the list is narrowed down well enough by voting day it's not really a problem. In the Alaska election voters only had to rank three candidates which is perfectly reasonable.
> RCV ballots state that you can choose to vote for only one candidate.
And we should retain the option. Choosing one and refusing to rank the others is pretty much the same as voting against everyone else, or in the case where your one chosen candidate is removed, more like not voting at all. I don't have a problem with letting people make that choice although I have heard it argued that voting should be compulsory. I'm not sure if that'd require a rank for everyone under RCV or not.
> People are used to casting ballots for their main choice, and if pressed I doubt most of the electorate would be able to describe the instant runoff process RCV enabled and you would be hard pressed to find a layman able to flesh out all the different scenarios of how their ballot would be counted in any particular close race.
This is perhaps the biggest problem and it applies to literally any change we make to our voting system. We need to educate the public on how the new system works, or at the very least provide information so that the public is able to inform themselves. I can't speak to how well Alaska made an effort to inform their population about the new voting system, but I will say that there are some very good youtube videos that explain the idea behind RCV pretty well.
Following any change there is bound to be a little confusion, but with time and little effort on the part of the people I'm convinced we'll be just as comfortable with an improved voting system (RCV or not) as we are with the one we're stuck with presently.
It seems possible that Palin lost due to voters incorrectly expressing their preferences by not putting a 2nd choice. If that is a routine thing, then it is indeed a problem with ranked choice voting in the real world, but it is NOT a structural flaw as you are claiming.
[1] https://electionscience.org/commentary-analysis/rcv-fools-pa...
[2] https://www.elections.alaska.gov/election-results/e/?id=22pr...
Which, cynically, might be the reason it has achieved the level of adoption that it has so far. We at least have to consider the possibility that the current major parties will only (disingenuously) support reforms that will, in the long run, further entrench their duopoly.
Any fight against RCV is purely a republican fight against more equitable and realistic representation for americans. It's not hard to understand, as plenty of schoolkids use RCV every year for school and mock elections. It is strictly better than plurality voting in terms of getting more people elected that more people are at least a little happy with. It by and large results in a more represented public.
If, by some magic, we end up in a world where politics is a utopia and the extremely contrived "issues" with RCV finally are worth caring about, THEN we can move to replace it, which will be easier in an environment that allows more nuance to politics, like RCV does.
For now, RCV is an easy way to get a broadly better political system. It is currently only disliked by like 1000 turbonerds who spend their time making absurdly complicated voting systems to solve ever more contrived voting situations, situations that broadly aren't the problems currently facing the world, and every other opponent is a republican who either believes incorrect partisan rhetoric ("it's more than one vote!") or cynically understands how it will cause them to lose elections and for some reason think that's a bad thing.
Oh, republicans are already attacking it because of Alaska
https://washingtonmonthly.com/2022/09/06/sarah-palin-and-the...
Using that as justification for why ranked choice should be adopted is circular reasoning.
It's also a non-sensical claim, any voting system "ranking" depends on specifics of the electoral system. For example, larger multi-winner districts using some sort of proportional or Condorcet system are always better that any ranked or approval result in a single winner districts.
It's also worth considering that the same parties who benefit from First Past The Post would be threatened by a change to literally any other system aside from FPTP or Ranked Choice Voting. Surely that comes into play when voting reform movements are funded. And surely that kind of "conspiracy talk" shouldn't be dismissed in an intellectual forum when there is a very clear path to how these reforms could directly affect very powerful parties.
Hello, I prefer RCV. Reasons:
- it is a stepping stone to proportional representation (achieved by adopting both RCV and multi-member districts), which is much more important than which single-winner voting system is chosen
- you need to be a fellow voting systems nerd to understand when you may want to vote tactically in RCV, so approximately zero people will vote insincerely
- it is really obvious that voting tactically is an option in approval voting, and so lots of people will vote insincerely and this will undermine the confidence in the voting system
- while single-winner RCV may not result in many more third-party winners (we need multi-winner RCV, i.e. proportional representation for that), it will change the kinds of winners for the two dominant parties, which is just as important. This point is always under appreciated.
- RCV has much more momentum behind it
I don't think this is true. Consider a hypothetical voter whose sincere party preference order is "Constitution > Libertarian > Republican > Green > Democrat > Socialist > Communist". It doesn't take very big of a logical leap to say "it basically always seems to be a Republican or Democrat who wins, so for my vote to count the most, I should vote Republican > Constitution > Libertarian > Green > Socialist > Communist > Democrat."
There are proportional methods for STAR and approval as well, there's no reason they couldn't be the stepping stones from this perspective
> you need to be a fellow voting systems nerd to understand when you may want to vote tactically in RCV, so approximately zero people will vote insincerely
Yet that doesn't try and stop people from duping voters into eg only ranking Palin, even though RCV is basically the only system where there is practically 0 reason to not rank additional candidates. Your point mostly makes sense but in practice I wouldn't expect high amounts of tactical voting in STAR either for similar reasons. And from another perspective - if someone were to eg bullet vote in STAR to help their first choice win, is that really tactical voting, or just an honest vote/admission that they care so much about their first choice that all other opponents are equally bad? In my opinion, being forced to grapple with compromise would be good for society.
> it is really obvious that voting tactically is an option in approval voting, and so lots of people will vote insincerely and this will undermine the confidence in the voting system
Possibly, although I think bullet voting is much less common than people think it would be. That said, people want to be able to express preferences so I think the best use of approval is in primaries where the top two candidates proceed to the general. Outside of that I'm kind of meh on approval, and if people have to choose between approval vs RCV or approval vs STAR, I expect RCV/STAR to win almost every time.
> while single-winner RCV may not result in many more third-party winners (we need multi-winner RCV, i.e. proportional representation for that), it will change the kinds of winners for the two dominant parties, which is just as important. This point is always under appreciated.
Will it? With RCV the two dominant parties no longer have to worry about the spoiler effect, so there is even less incentive to reach across the aisle and receive influence from a third party than before. Whereas before you might want to take some token talking points from a third party and siphon some votes from them, with RCV you might be able to assume you'll get those voter's 2nd choices for free.
Proportional approval voting is extremely confusing (and expensive) to compute the winner, people won’t accept a system that they don’t understand how it works.
> Yet that doesn't try and stop people from duping voters into eg only ranking Palin, even though RCV is basically the only system where there is practically 0 reason to not rank additional candidates.
It’s the first election where people used it so they will learn about that. Also some people might just want to vote for Palin and are indifferent after that. While I would fill out the entire ballot, most people won’t bother, and that’s fine.
> if someone were to eg bullet vote in STAR to help their first choice win, is that really tactical voting, or just an honest vote/admission that they care so much about their first choice that all other opponents are equally bad?
No it does not necessarily mean that, it could plausibly mean that they do have a second preference, but are afraid of giving them points so that they don’t overtake their first preference. Think of a Bernie, Hillary, Trump election where some Bernie voters don’t want to give high points to Hilary, even though they much prefer her to Trump, for fear of her beating Bernie. RCV allows them to confidently vote Bernie > Hillary > Trump and not worry about this problem.
> I think the best use of approval is in primaries where the top two candidates proceed to the general.
I think it would be best to ditch primaries completely and have everyone run in a multi-winner general election with RCV. So few people vote in primaries, so the highly engaged extremists influence the outcome for everyone in the general. Also why do I need to vote twice for the same position, it’s annoying. It would be nice to only need to vote in one election, the general.
> With RCV the two dominant parties no longer have to worry about the spoiler effect, so there is even less incentive to reach across the aisle and receive influence from a third party than before. Whereas before you might want to take some token talking points from a third party and siphon some votes from them, with RCV you might be able to assume you'll get those voter's 2nd choices for free.
It seems like you are talking about two things at once:
1. a major party moderating their position to get votes from the other major party
2. a major party taking a (more extreme?) position to get votes from a third party
When you say “reach across the aisle”, to me that means #1 above, i.e. Democrats and Republicans moderating their positions to appeal to the median voter. I agree that would be good and RCV does encourage that!
RCV doesn’t encourage #2, and I think that’s also a good thing.
I would love a robust multi-party system, but for that we really need proportional representation. Trying to get it with single-winner elections, no matter the system, isn’t a good approach.
Well that's the whole point I was making. In STAR if they really don't like Hillary but prefer her to Trump, they can vote Bernie 5, Hillary 1, Trump 0. Yes, they've very marginally increased the likelihood that Hillary reaches the runoff instead of Bernie, but in doing so they have ensured that in the runoff their vote will contribute to Bernie over Hillary or Hillary over Trump (depending who reaches the runoff). If they aren't willing to give up even one point on a 5 point scale in order to express that preference in the runoff, I'd argue that they have essentially admitted that their preference for Bernie to win is so strong that it overrides any of their other preferences. It's just an honest vote. It could perhaps be a miscalculated vote if they don't understand the implications of that kind of vote, but if they understand and still vote as such then it's honest.
If anything I consider this an advantage of STAR over RCV. Political polarization has gotten to a ridiculous point and we should be encouraging finding common ground. STAR helps facilitate this kind of dialog on a societal level while RCV implicitly tells people they can have their first choice without needing to find any common ground with other camps. In RCV there is not even the option to have your lower choices counted alongside your first choice in any given elimination round. STAR gives voters the ability to choose whether to compromise or not.
https://www.electionscience.org/library/approval-voting-vers...
There's nothing "objective" about it. Just because it's a number you can calculate doesn't make it the right number. Some people think it's a good metric for evaluating voting systems, but many others don't, and there isn't even remotely any kind of consensus that it's a good or even useful measure.
I genuinely don't understand why people are so hardheadedly loyal to this one centuries-old poorly-designed voting system. Just because it's the first one they heard of? I don't get it.
You say pretty much any other proposal is better, plenty of other people say the other proposals mostly look even worse.
I don't understand why you ascribe this to "hardheaded loyalty" instead of people just genuinely disagreeing with you, and that they have good reasons for it.
Purely in theory, one would probably prefer a system where all voters have to rank all the candidates; in practice, however, all of voting, validating, counting, applying the rules, and understanding the rules is significantly more difficult than approval voting where a candidate's points is simply the number of times a voter has marked their name on the ballot. You can (generally or for more important decisions) amend approval voting with a quorum, minimum percentage of approval, or minimal distance between first and second places without damaging the system with too much complexity, something I cannot even fathom how to achieve with ranked choice.
Since some people here might interpret it as being presented as objective fact or some consensus opinion.
There are a lot of pros/cons to all of the richer voting systems, usually categorized as approval voting, ranked voting, and score voting, in terms of increasing information.
But there is absolutely no consensus that approval or score are better than ranked. (In my opinion, ranked comes out ahead, and I talk about why in another comment here.)
But most of all, ranked choice is what has the growing momentum, as a lot of reform organizations have concluded it's the best practical solution. But what's most important is that we adopt one of them, and it would be a shame to spend our effort squabbling over which alternative, than giving support to the one that has the most momentum and chance of succeeding now. We're really only even having this conversation now because of the success reform groups have had in promoting ranked voting.