1y ago

Ranked Choice Voting - A Community for Discussion and Organizing to Implement Ranked Choice Voting

ponder.cat

Ranked Choice Voting - Pondercat

Ranked Choice Voting

!rcv@ponder.cat

16 comments

What's ranked choice voting?
- You can vote for more than one candidate, but you rank them by order of preference. This way, third party and independent candidates actually have a chance.
  
  Oh, we do that for our mayoral elections
- https://representnv.us/better-ways-to-do-voting/
Is this meant for a particular country, or just RCV discussion in general?
- It could be any country. My part of it will be US focused but anywhere in the world that it's happening is welcome.
  
  As a Canadian pushing for proportional representation I support your goal as well!
  Solidarity in having more options in politics.
I was expecting a Catalan instance, a bit disappointed ha ha
Good luck!
Why not acceptance/range voting?
- Anything is better than what we've got. Unifying around one fairly good method that's leaps and bounds better than FPTP and then if that works, trying to use the momentum to get somewhere better than that, seems better than fracturing the effort all over the place while most of the US is still using the world's worst system in the present.
  
  It would be good to have a place to discuss the merits of different systems. If you want to make a change, the bulk of your efforts are going to be in breaking out of the FPTP system, and that doesn't change regardless of which voting system you support.
- Can you describe those? Most people have only heard of ranked choice as an alternative.
  
  Put simply you just give every candidate points out of 10 and then elect the one with the highest average.
  Approval voting (not acceptance, my mistake), simplifies things a bit by only allowing none or all points. Which is the best if you want to vote tactically anyway.
  This method sidesteps a couple of the issues that Arrow's impossibility theorem raises, and is easy enough to understand. Ranked choice is better than first past the post but still has the issue that adding an additional candidate can affect the end result in complex ways.
  With approval voting most aspects are easy to understand. Adding or removing candidates trivially has no effect on the rest of the result. And while you can still vote tactically the only real tactic is where you put your cutoff, you should still vote for the option(s) you like best.
There’s also STAR https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/STAR_voting

16 comments