This is literally the entire point that ranked choice voting is designed to solve.
The fact that most Americans don't seem keen/prioritized on implementing it, despite wide-scale disillusion at the two party system is mind-boggling to me.
The fact that most Americans don't seem keen/prioritized on implementing it, despite wide-scale disillusion at the two party system is mind-boggling to me.
Interestingly though (but not surprisingly) there is a lot of anti rank choice media coverage of the process.
When I tell people my city does that, some respond with “oh that sounds terrible! I heard the news that system is so complicated and hard to run! It probably took you weeks to find out who won!?”
This disconnect between my great experience with the system and the general perception of the process much bigger than I expected.
Now we just have to ask… who benefits from pushing a bad narrative about rank choice voting
Any party that already has high likelihoods of winning the election will be hurt by RCV.
Your opposition to RCV should increase with your distance from the center. RCV reduces the chances of fringe candidates being successful. Traditional U.S. systems reduce the chances of centrists.
Most intelligent strategists prefer to lose 50% of elections than to lose 90% of elections.
No, it won't. RCV doesn’t hurt duopoly at all. It generally rewards the more centrist subfactions of whatever the two dominant factions would be without it, so if (in the USA) you views are best represented by a blend of the corporate capitalist neoliberal wing of the Democratic and the anti-Trump wing of the Republican Party, RCV is a boon for you.
If your views are not well represented in the current system, they will be even less represented with winner-take-all elections under RCV. For that, you need multiwinner elections producing proportional-ish results, whether party list, STV (the multiwinner system of which RCV/IRV is the single-winner form), MMP, or some other system.
In practice, ranked-choice voting means instant runoff voting, where you basically throw out candidates who didn't get enough votes until you get someone who wins. In the US, this means that it's still going to be a choice between the Democrat and the Republican, but you'll get 10% or so of the population to feel comfortable voting for $THIRD_PARTY knowing they can still express their opinion in the Democrat-Republican race. It's political placebo, except if the results are even somewhat messy, you'll get bellyaching from people who do bad statistics to say they should have won (witness the recent Alaskan election decided in this manner).
There's another set of ranked-choice voting based on Condorcet methods, which run all two-way races simultaneously and picks the candidate who wins all of their races (with different variants for handling the case who no one can do this [1]). The downside of these methods is that they're more confusing and, if you thought that instant runoff produces unclear mandates, Condorcet methods are going to render those results even less clear.
Ultimately, the ills of American politics have very little to do with its use of the first-past-the-post voting system; switching to different systems are likely to produce the exact same results [2].
[1] The most intellectually honest, IMHO, is to just declare the race at a tie in this case. I imagine that politics would be better if we were more honest about very close results indicating ties rather than pretending that it's a decisive mandate for victory.
[2] Another statistic to remember is the vast majority of people will vote for an extremist on their side of the aisle over the moderate on the other side.
I would prefer a candidate who was the first choice of 30% of Party A voters and the second choice of 40% of Party B voters over a candidate who was the first choice of 65% of Party A voters and the second choice of 2% of Party B voters.
Admittedly, RCV doesn't guarantee this, but it seems much more promising. If you can get winners that 70% of voters can live with, that seems better than the current situation. And it would change strategies dramatically. I would expect fewer appeals to mobilize extremist bases.
I think it would also make voting more granular. People would focus on individual issues more. Their first choice might look the same as today, but for their second choice should they choose the guns-rights abortionst or the gun-control pro-lifer? That second choice now impacts the election result in a meaningful way.
It's when a Condorcet winner does not exist that Condorcet compliant methods get hard to explain.
There are alternatives to IRV, almost every single one of which is better. IRV is a bolt-on plug-n-play implementation to existing winner-take-all voting for lazy bureaucrats.
I worry that a populace that can't understand "large urban counties take longer to count their many votes, leading to big vote swings hours after the polls change" and storms Congress over it will have even more challenges understanding the ranked choice setup, though.
Good enough that IMHO the benefits clearly outweigh the concerns. The beauty of the fragmentation of voting in the US, is that we can roll out different voting systems incrementally and be able to collect data on how they work without "betting the farm" on one election.
In a hypothetical world, roughly evenly split on religion, where everyone would be pretty okay with secular tolerance, picking secular tolerance seems like the way to go. But if most people would somewhat prefer to try and force their particular religion on everyone if they can get away with it, secular tolerance will be everyone's second choice and will be discarded in the first round of voting... unless enough people recognize the dynamic and vote strategically rather than honestly, but that undermines the point of RCV.
I'll leave it to you to decide for yourself how much the real world resembles that hypothetical, but as I said it worries me.
The people in power are not incentivized to do this. Thus they convince the masses that it's a bad thing.
Even if people agree that they don't like the two parties, it doesn't mean that they agree on the same third party. Most likely, their last-ranked choice, but it's going to be named by the most people. The winner will probably be one of those two.
I'm all for it, especially if it makes people feel heard. Maybe somebody who made a strong showing can leverage that in future elections. Perhaps there will be a few candidates who can put on strong campaigns without a party support, and that will bolster confidence.
But I predict that the most likely outcome is that people say "It's rigged and there's no difference from the old way".
Slavery is the original sin of the American Consitution - parties are the second sin.
How can parties be the second sin of the Constitution? The Constitution literally doesn't even envision their existence, to the point that the procedure for electing the president and vice president had to be changed to account for their existence.
In the next election there was an open seat for my Congress person. There were something like 5 progressive candidates, and one more conservative democrat. Of course, the progressive vote split and the conservative candidate won, even though he was probably the last choice among a majority of voters. I found that super ironic.
So while it can upset the first to the post strategies, thd electorate can be disappointed in the results.
I am very interested in the amount of negative sentiment to RCV in the zeitgeist and am trying to determine if it is coming from lived experience of issues with the voting system or from somewhere else....
You may disagree with that take and say it only happens sometimes. I think we can at least agree it's not settled that it results in better election cycles.
I found the discussion in the Deseret piece regarding how the result of the Alaska senatorial election seemed "unintuitive" to many voters to be very interesting! When I look at the numbers and results in that election is seems clear that the outcome is exactly what I would hope to see (and seemingly is a text-book case of RCV in action). But alas, when you deploy to production, things rarely go as planned and it is clear that I need to give more weight to the human element in all of this. Even if the results are statistically desirable, that does not mean that voters will actually feel good about the result of the election....
It works in a super intuitive way that leads to the least dissatisfaction among voters.
1. ranked choice voting (to eliminate the spoiler effect, truly opening the way for a non-duopolistic political environment)
2. open, non-partisan primaries
3. independent redistricting commissions (to eliminate gerrymandering)
Looking into the details it seems the results can't be blamed on voter exhaustion, as the Democratic candidate would have won even if all exhausted votes in the second-to-last round would have gone to the remaining Republican candidate, so I'm open to the idea that this wasn't a failure of ranked choice voting, but rather a genuine shift in Alaskan politics. Still, it doesn't seem very likely. Alaska went for Donald Trump by a comfortable margin in the 2020 elections, and a Republican hasn't lost a statewide race there since 1972 - until now. But on the other hand, it's hard to look at the election results and see how the Republican candidate could have beat the Democrat candidate in a head-to-head first-past-the-post election.
So... I don't know. Maybe people just vote differently when forced to pick between two candidates than they do when ranking candidates on a ballot with multiple choices? Perhaps the 2024 election results will bring more clarity...
[1]: https://www.elections.alaska.gov/RCV.php
[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alaska%27s_at-large_congressio...
[3]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_presidential_ele...
[4]: https://www.elections.alaska.gov/results/22GENR/US%20REP.pdf