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...