this post was submitted on 13 Jan 2024
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United States | News & Politics
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This is not a good choice. It's not like we haven't known about approval voting. (Vote for as many candidates as you want, largest number wins.) It's that it's just our current system with extra steps for the same outcome. Ranked Choice Voting solves the psychological dilemma of making sure the bad guy doesn't get elected while actually holding the reserve choice in reserve.
I also find the assertion that RCV is difficult to understand a bit condescending. You get X number of choices, (we'll say 3) and your number 1 stays in until they're knocked out by having the least number of votes. Then your ballot switches to your number 2 and so on. So you could safely vote Bernie and Biden knowing Biden can't just win by being the safety candidate anymore.
What the nice looking page doesn't tell you is that in approval voting that's been done in the US voters largely still voted for a single candidate. And RCV is well understood and liked in the jurisdictions that already use it. Over all approval voting favors the current major parties and RCV does not.
Edit - just adding to this to say that the site linked, the center for election science is riddled with GOP propaganda once you get far enough down the rabbit hole. Please don't let them sucker you.
RCV fails the Sincere Favorite Criterion. People claim that it's safe to vote honestly under RCV, but that's actually not true. Sometimes you're better-off by demoting your favorite or even not voting at all This stems from RCV's non-monotonicity problem, where increasing support for a candidate can cause them to do worse (or vice versa). This is an unacceptable failure.
If you want to see some of the whacky results RCV can produce, play around with this spacial election simulation tool. I'm not kidding when I say this is the first result I got, which I set up in literally five seconds while blind to the RCV calculation. The green candidate has three completely separate win regions and they're not even inside any of them. When green is obviously the most popular candidate, they lose. That's completely unacceptable.
I'm not sure what you're on about with approval voting having extra steps compared to choose one. If anything, RCV is the one with extra steps. Even in the previous link, RCV is noticably slower to calculate.
Approval is used in both Fargo and St. Louis. The number of votes people tend to cast depends on how many candidates are running. The 2021 St. Louis primary had 4 candidates and voters averaged 1.56 votes cast. Since it would be moronic to vote for all 4 candidates, a likely vote distribution would have been something like 50% 1 vote, 40% 2 votes, 10% 3 votes. The 2022 Fargo election had similar results, with elections averaging 1.6 and 3 votes per ballot. In large fields, you can get some very high number of votes.
It's popular, it's accurate, it's simple as hell.
I think that single seat constituencies are an obsolete paradigm altogether
Hard agree! Those are rookie numbers. We gotta pump those numbers up! It's my understanding that 5 member districts is the smallest you can go and still be functionally impossible to gerrymander.