4 ms·
While classic voting has it's drawbacks it does produces a winner which has the clear majority of the voters. The problem with many of these alternative voting
by zackees 5y ago
While classic voting has it's drawbacks it does produces a winner which has the clear majority of the voters. The problem with many of these alternative voting systems like "ranked choice" is that they are very complex and this allows a sufficiently sophisticated entity to game the system to such an extent that it produces a surprise minority result without a clear mandate of the voters.
Cautionary Examples
Another example of this problem is demonstrated by what happened in
Australia (which uses ranked choice voting) in the 2010 election. The liberal
Labor Party won the Australian House despite receiving only “38 percent
of first-place votes on the initial ballot, while the second-place Liberal-National coalition [the center right choice] captured 43 percent” of first-place
votes.
In other words, more voters wanted a center-right government than
a left-wing government, but ranked choice made sure that did not happen.
Or consider the mayor’s race in Oakland, California, in 2010, in which
the candidate that received the most first-place votes lost the election to “a
candidate on the strength of nearly 25,000 second- and third-place votes”
after nine rounds of redistribution of the votes.6
This also happened recently in Maine. In 2018, the first-ever general election for federal office in our nation’s history was decided by ranked choice
voting in the Second Congressional District in Maine. Jared Golden (D)
was declared the eventual winner—even though incumbent Bruce Poliquin
(R) received more votes than Golden in the first round. There were two
additional candidates in the race, Tiffany Bond and William Hoar. However,
the Maine Secretary of State, Matt Dunlop, “exhausted” or threw out a total
of 14,076 ballots of voters who had not ranked all of the candidates."
Source: https://www.heritage.org/sites/default/files/2019-08/IB4996.pd https://www.heritage.org/sites/default/files/2019-08/IB4996....
- naniwaduni 5y agoBeing transparently fair and not very complex is a great case for approval voting.
- throw_away 5y agoIf you expect the first round winner to always win, then what would be the point of doing RCV at all? First round RCV winner is the same as FPTP winner. The entire reason why you would pick RCV over FPTP is because of those cases where first round plurality winner doesn't express the intent of the electorate. That said, the OP link goes into detail about real issues with RCV & describes superior alternatives.