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It’s nearly unanimous: The political elite don’t like ranked-choice voting
(thenevadaindependent.com)
this post was submitted on 19 Oct 2024
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Ranked Choice Voting
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Welcome to the Ranked Choice Voting Community!
Voting is broken! Let's fix it.
Ranked Choice Voting (RCV) is a voting system in which voters rank candidates by preference on their ballots. If a candidate wins a majority of first-preference votes, they are declared the winner. If no candidate wins a majority, the candidate with the fewest votes is eliminated, and votes for that candidate are redistributed to the remaining candidates, based on the next preference on each ballot. This process continues until one candidate has a majority. Learn more about how it works.
Why Ranked Choice Voting?
- Prevents the tyranny of the middle
- Encourages diversity of candidates
- Discourages negative campaigning
- Provides more choice for voters
- Saves money by avoiding runoff elections
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When Americans say "ranked choice voting", what they typically mean is Instant Runoff Voting. It's kinda the bare minimum you can have and actually consider your system democratic. Ireland actually uses the much better (but also much more complicated—on the back end, from the voters' perspective they have to do the same thing) system of Single Transferable Vote. A system that is not only preferential but also semi-proportional.
The main difference is STV is used to elect multiple people. In a general presidential election, STV is IRV. Both IRV and STV are types of Ranked Choice Voting.
It would make sense to use STV for - for example - state representatives and senators. The simplest way to do this would be to get rid of congressional districts, which would also eliminate gerrymandering - a process that excludes the electorate and yet had a significant impact on the outcome of elections. Alternatively, we'd have to changing the sizes of the Senate and house.
The reason most efforts in states today advocate RCV is because it leaves open both options: IRV for non-proportional elections, like comptroller, governor, or sheriff; and STV for proportional representation offices, like houses, senates, and board members. RCV is what the voter sees on the ballot; IRV and STV is how votes are proportioned.