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New York City adopts ranked-choice voting, a major milestone for the reform

• jfengel 7y ago
  In the US, we already have a two-stage voting system for many contests. It's inelegant, and requires people to show up twice, but it's not entirely unlike an alternative-choice system already. So I suspect that people who have pinned a lot of hopes on a different voting scheme will be disappointed. I believe that New York's local elections tend to be dominated by one party, and thus there is only one "real" election that occurs back during the primaries. It will be interesting to see what effects, if any, it has there. But at the larger levels, where we have primary and general elections, it seems to me that it might increase rancor. Instead of hammering out inter-factional differences at the primary and coming together for the general, you end up fighting both your main opponent and somebody with whom you have substantial overlap. Both of them have substantial incentive to be negative: despite voter complaints about negativity, it often wins elections. In the end there will be only one winner, and it may end up being the one who is best capable of keeping allies in line rather than reaching out.