psephomancy.bsky.social
I used to donate to FairVote and supported RCV because I didn't fully understand it.
After realizing it doesn't live up to its promises, I switched to supporting consensus voting systems like STAR Voting, Condorcet-consistent systems, and Approval Voting.
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This is very sad. I'm sorry for your loss. He did a lot of good work on modeling voting systems, and made the world a better place.
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Doesn't Plurality meet both Later No Harm and Monotonicity?
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The problem with IRV is that voting honestly hurts the chances of your second favorite, so you are incentivized to dishonestly vote for the Lesser Evil as your #1, so it perpetuates the same problems as Plurality Voting.
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The good thing about the more democratic systems is that they're more understandable, too. Here is one example: edwardbfoley.substack.com/p/bracket-vo...
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What do you mean? 🤨
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"many argue that the ranked choice voting system guarantees that even in races with many candidates, winners have the support of majority of voters"
Also incorrect, unfortunately. The majority of voters can support candidate A over B, and RCV can still eliminate A and elect B.
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"They don't feel as though they are splitting or throwing away their votes."
A misconception, unfortunately. The form of RCV use in the US still suffers from vote-splitting, so you still need to rank the Lesser Evil 1st to avoid throwing your vote away.
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Unfortunately, the type of RCV promoted in the US is flawed in the same ways as the system it's replacing, which means it only perpetuates a polarized two-party system. We need to educate people about better reforms like Total Vote Runoff, STAR Voting, and Approval Voting that actually work.
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In an ideal world, we'd use good voting systems that allow >2 candidates to run, and closed party primaries would just be an endorsement that the candidate represents that party well, and candidates that don't get that endorsement could still run in the general without splitting the vote.
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My 2¢: Closed party primaries aren't the problem; vote-splitting and the two-party system is the problem, and open primaries are a clumsy workaround for that problem. If held using FPTP, they have bad vote-splitting, too. (Unified Primary is good, but is essentially its own system.)
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Welcome to … whatever we former RCV enthusiasts are called!
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It doesn't implicitly favor one party over another, but it does suffer from vote-splitting, so it is biased toward whichever party runs fewer candidates.
Here's another Washington Post article that explains the problem and proposes a better system: www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/202...
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Open primaries are an independent issue from the voting system, though. With a good voting system that allowed for more than two strong candidates, party primaries wouldn't matter.
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Actually, the form of RCV used in Alaska only counts first-choice rankings in each round, so it suffers from the "center-squeeze effect" and has a built-in bias against moderate candidates.
If you want to elect the most representative candidates, you need a consensus voting method like Ranked Robin
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If you want to use ranked ballots and break the two-party system, you need to count *all* the rankings that voters express on their ballots, which means adopting systems like Ranked Robin, Total Vote Runoff, Ranked Pairs, etc. www.equal.vote/ranked_robin electionlawblog.org?p=132792
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This isn't true, unfortunately. The form of RCV used in the US counts only first-choice rankings in each round, just like Plurality Voting, so it tends to suffer from the same vote-spitting and spoiler effect problems as Plurality.
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"Solution: Popular vote"
Agreed, though it won't make much difference if we still use Plurality voting. It will still be a polarized two-party system, just slightly more representative.
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If you want to fix vote-splitting and use ranked ballots, you need to count *all* the preferences expressed on them, not just the first-choice rankings. There are many systems that do this, including Ranked Robin, Total Vote Runoff, Ranked Pairs, bracket tournaments, etc.
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"voters are not worried about wasting their votes"
It doesn't actually fix this problem, though. Ranking your third-party favorite as #1 can still backfire and help elect the greater evil, just like under Plurality, because RCV can prematurely eliminate your lower rankings due to vote-splitting.
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"Problem: Plurality voting" Yes!
"Solution: Ranked-choice voting" … No. 😐
At least not the form of RCV used in the US, which uses Plurality tallies to eliminate candidates, perpetuating the same vote-splitting and spoiler effect that drove you away from Plurality in the first place.
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Is this a … quadruple negative?
"rejected … dismiss … challenging … ban"
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We don't have more than two choices as long as we use plurality-based voting systems.