Political Memes

RCV is a bad option that's presented as if it could fix anything.

RCV was first invented in the 1780s, and the inventor wrote about it as the bad idea that it was, but because he was a mathematician, he wrote about the dead ends in the search for something better than the simple First Past the Post system that was in use in America.

The inventor, by the way, was Nicolas de Caritat, Marquis of Condorcet. His life was fascinating, and his death tragic, but for the moment we'll focus on his efforts to find a better voting system.

He created a criteria for a better voting system, now named in his honor. The Condorcet Winner is the candidate who can win against any other candidate in a one on one race. They're sometimes called the pairwise winner.

The point being, RCV, or it's older name of Instant Runoff, cannot reliably elect the Condorcet Winner.

This was why Condorcet abandoned the system.

It was revived by some guys a few decades after Condorcet's death. They didn't care that it was a flawed system, just that it was slightly better than the only other option available at the time.

But that was 200 years ago. We now have quite a few options that are not deeply flawed.

First is Approval. It's a dead simple system that always finds the Condorcet Winner.

How Approval works is thus; you get a list of names on your ballot. Mark any and all that you approve of. You may mark more than one candidate for each position.

The candidate with the highest overall approval wins.

Then there's STAR. It's brand new as far as voting systems go, only created in 2014. But it's also the best system designed to date.

Basically the voter rates each candidate on a scale of 0 to 5. Multiple candidates can have the same rating. To find the winner, you simply add up the ratings for each candidate, then you take the highest two and look at each ballot. The candidate with the higher rating on that ballot gets the vote. If neither of the top two is rated higher on a ballot, either being not rated or rated the same, then the ballot is counted as No Preference, and that number is reported as part of the final tally.