Ranked choice is 'the hot reform' in democracy. Here's what you should know about it
@peterdrake RCV is the “feel good” limited hangout op of voting reform. It doesn’t fix vote splitting, doesn’t diminish two-partydom, and doesn’t allow voters to express their preferences on the ballot.
@BreadAndSalt How do you figure it doesn't fix vote splitting? Gore would've won Florida in 2000 under ranked choice.
@peterdrake It does help (though I could go into why that’s not necessarily a “help” in the broader view) in splits where the spoiler pulls only a tiny amount of the vote, like Nader did. It would have helped in Portland’s 2020 mayoral race, too. But #RCV is prone to fail in situations where there are more than two real contenders.
@BreadAndSalt The article you linked to says RCV is prone to vote-splitting, but doesn't explain why. It simply says that "The most well known example of a spoiled election in a Ranked Choice election was the 2009 mayoral race in Burlington, Vermont." Do you have an explanation of the problem?
(In the cartoon example, RCV would transfer the Leia voters to Luke, defeating Vader.)
@peterdrake But kind of a TL;DR explanation is that RCV is just plurality voting over and over again. It only looks at the one layer of preferences at a time, so all the others get disregarded in a given round. In that way it replicates many of the sam pathologies as plurality voting, only with more chaos thrown into the mix. In the Alaska case, the tally algorithm didn’t know that Palin voters preferred Begich 2nd until after Begich was knocked out.
@BreadAndSalt Interesting stuff!
I'm aware of Arrow's Theorem, and that the only thing voting reform advocates can agree on is that plurality is the worst choice.
Most of the arguments come down to:
1) This weird thing can happen with the system I don't like.
2) This weird thing happened in these specific elections using this system.
3) Modeling a distribution of possible sets of voter preferences, my preferred system is less likely to do something weird.
I'd love to see analyses that measure what tends to happen across many actual elections -- in how many does each system reach the "wrong" result? (Of course, it's hard to gather data for elections that were run under plurality, because we don't know about second choices, approval thresholds, etc.)
All that said, I still think RCV is an improvement over plurality, and I'll support it for now, because:
1) It finally gives third parties a chance to find out if they're losing because (a) people are afraid to "waste" their vote or (b) their views are just not held by very many people,
2) Any crack in the nut of plurality is a win. Once we've tried one alternative, it will be easier to sell others. RCV is the thing with momentum now, but if STAR, approval, etc. take the lead later, I'm open to those as well.
On a related note, I strongly support abolishing the Electoral College.
@peterdrake And abolish the Senate while we’re at it!
My concern is the converse, actually. I’m afraid when people see how weirdly RCV can behave, they’ll paint all voting reform with that brush. No one wants to be Charlie missing the football again. I could go on about all of RCV’s shortcomings compared to many other voting methods, but I should probably just write a paper or blog about it. This one does a good job summarizing some of the key points, though:
@BreadAndSalt What's your favorite system?
@peterdrake I like the Equal.vote trio of Approval, STAR, and Ranked Robin as solid choices. Approval for its simplicity, STAR for its expressiveness and accuracy, and Ranked Robin for contexts where “ranking” is strongly preferred or legally required over “rating.”
@peterdrake Here’s a short video with an example scenario: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JtKAScORevQ
Here’s a more in depth analysis of the recent Alaska failure:
https://web.archive.org/web/20220923044934/https://electionscience.org/commentary-analysis/rcv-fools-palin-voters-into-electing-a-progressive-democrat/
For a really interesting graphical depiction comparing the failure space of a variety of voting methods, Ka-Ping Yee’s simulations are eye opening: http://zesty.ca/voting/sim/