Ranked choice voting fundamentally shifted the dynamics of New York's Mayoral primary race – imagine what it could do on a national scale in the US or UK.
Completely support electoral reform - but I'm aware of lots of criticisms with RCV, especially how despite being better than FPTP it can still be very distorting.
e.g.
• If your second choice candidate gets eliminated early on, when your first choice is eliminated your votes are wasted.
• Ballots have many more opportunities to be spoiled (same ranks, skipped ranks, multiple ranks)
• Ballots have to be tallied centrally and are harder to verify in batches.
They make a persuasive case for STAR voting. I think if we're going to reform our electoral system we need STAR as a more bulletproof alternative to minimise controversies and potential backsliding.
STAR voting looks like a variant of the Borda count (like the Eurovision Song Contest voting system) except that a voter can score multiple candidates the same. The problem with this system is it is easily gamable. In a traditional Borda count (where the voter has to give each candidate a different score) there's incentive to insincerely rank highest the candidate the voter thinks is best able to beat the candidate they hate but who could win. In STAR voting this could be taken to the extreme, because if there are any candidates you really don't want to win, then the best tactical vote is to simply give the candidates you hate scores of 0, and everyone else the highest available score. The system is also prone to tied winners.
RCV is extremely difficult to game. There are theoretical scenarios providing incentives to vote tactically or strategically, but they almost invariably involve such precise knowledge of the voting patterns of other voters that they would not work in reality and could easily backfire. The most effective vote under RCV is a sincere ranking of the voter's own preferences among the candidates. If you no longer care, just stop. Incidentally, if your 2nd choice is eliminated before your 1st choice, then your vote passes onto your 3rd choice, or 4th or 5th and so on. You never know, one of those could be the winner.
I'll also mention in passing "Ranked Robin", aka Condorcet. The biggest problem with this one, apart from the exponentially rising number of comparisons required with increasing number of candidates, is that it doesn't always produce a definitive "winner".
don't necessarily disagree (for Britain, we advocate for a commission on electoral reform to deliberate on which system makes most sense) but the difference between RCV and FPTP is palpable
Anathema to Trump, Farage and, er, Starmer and Badenoch.
Completely support electoral reform - but I'm aware of lots of criticisms with RCV, especially how despite being better than FPTP it can still be very distorting.
e.g.
• If your second choice candidate gets eliminated early on, when your first choice is eliminated your votes are wasted.
• Ballots have many more opportunities to be spoiled (same ranks, skipped ranks, multiple ranks)
• Ballots have to be tallied centrally and are harder to verify in batches.
This page by Equal Vote explains it much better detail: https://www.equal.vote/rcv_v_star
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They make a persuasive case for STAR voting. I think if we're going to reform our electoral system we need STAR as a more bulletproof alternative to minimise controversies and potential backsliding.
STAR voting looks like a variant of the Borda count (like the Eurovision Song Contest voting system) except that a voter can score multiple candidates the same. The problem with this system is it is easily gamable. In a traditional Borda count (where the voter has to give each candidate a different score) there's incentive to insincerely rank highest the candidate the voter thinks is best able to beat the candidate they hate but who could win. In STAR voting this could be taken to the extreme, because if there are any candidates you really don't want to win, then the best tactical vote is to simply give the candidates you hate scores of 0, and everyone else the highest available score. The system is also prone to tied winners.
RCV is extremely difficult to game. There are theoretical scenarios providing incentives to vote tactically or strategically, but they almost invariably involve such precise knowledge of the voting patterns of other voters that they would not work in reality and could easily backfire. The most effective vote under RCV is a sincere ranking of the voter's own preferences among the candidates. If you no longer care, just stop. Incidentally, if your 2nd choice is eliminated before your 1st choice, then your vote passes onto your 3rd choice, or 4th or 5th and so on. You never know, one of those could be the winner.
I'll also mention in passing "Ranked Robin", aka Condorcet. The biggest problem with this one, apart from the exponentially rising number of comparisons required with increasing number of candidates, is that it doesn't always produce a definitive "winner".
don't necessarily disagree (for Britain, we advocate for a commission on electoral reform to deliberate on which system makes most sense) but the difference between RCV and FPTP is palpable