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Comment by carlosdp | Hacker News Reader

I feel like a lot of people take it as obvious that ranked-choice is just better. I have an alternate take:

We just went through a simple first-past-the-post election in the US that a significant percentage of voters believe was rigged. This is the simplest system imaginable, the data is easily available to verify it was not rigged.

Do we really think the average american will be able to grok how ranked-choice voting works? Imagine for a moment the reaction from people when their candidate appears to be "winning" and then ends up 3rd after the "recalculation."

I feel like the first priority of a voting system needs to be transparency and being easy to understand, RCV isn't that. Maybe works well on small scale, I highly doubt it's a good idea nationally.

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Alternatively, you could view the situation as: if the even the simplest voting system can be successfully attacked by a convincing enough demagogue, perhaps the complexity of the voting system isn't that important and we wouldn't actually lose much by picking a better but more complex system.

In the end, the attacks were not on the vote system itself, but on the real-life voting process - fear of double-voting, of fraudulent votes, of dead people voting etc.

This is one of the arguments for approval voting. It's simple enough to be trusted by everybody with all the good properties of RCV and some superior things like rendering negative campaigning useless.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Approval_voting

https://electionscience.org/

Approval voting is my favorite method as well. The best benefit IMO is that someome who votes the same as before is still making a valid vote, they've just set their approval threshold high enough that only one candidate meets it.

It's obvious that it's easier to show someone how public vote tallies are calculated then convince them the entire chain of custody for ballets was secure.

Even if they don't understand it themselves, it's just simple math done in public which would be easy to refute by any educated person.

do you really think those people don't understand how the current vote works? you can't wake up a person who is pretending to be asleep..

Well, we can, that's what buckets of cold water are for.

However, just like with pouring cold water on people in real life, you probably won't get the reaction you seek.

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