I hope they implement ranked choice, so many of the current problems are from the two party system which is inevitable from first past the post.
this post was submitted on 29 Jun 2024
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Unfortunately, RCV doesn't end the two party system. It's better than what we have, but only marginally. My hope is that when voters complain about it, the next step is not to repeal RCV but to evolve into Star voting.
RCV at least allows for options, and it's pretty easy to understand. First past the post is literally the worst.
Agreed. But it still encourages strategic voting and discourages third-party spoilers. It's fptp with extra steps, and it gets worse the more candidates you have. If you don't pick a frontrunner first or second, there's a chance your vote isn't counted at all.
Uhhh, no. That’s not how RCV works at all.
Let’s say there are five candidates - A, B , C, D, and E.
Let’s assume candidates A & B are the most popular.
Personally I choose to rank them as C, E, D, B and then A.
Out of all of them, no one gets over 50% of the #1 vote. Whoever gets the lowest #1 vote is knocked out first. Let’s suggest that this is C. All of their #1 votes and therefore my vote is then transferred to E.
Let’s suggest that after this there’s still no one who has over 50% of the vote between the other four candidates. Let’s further assume that candidate E has the lowest resulting vote after the first round of knockout. My vote is then transferred to candidate D.
Out of A, B, and D, let’s assume none of them still have over 50% of the vote after this redistribution. Let’s further assume that D has the lowest vote of the three. My vote is then transferred to B.
Given there are only two candidates left, one will have to have a majority. That candidate wins.
Under RCV, as long as you mark every box with a preference your vote can never ever be wasted. It will always end up with a candidate that wins or one that loses, but it cannot ever be exhausted and therefore meaningless.
Thank you for providing an example.
Let's say E is everyone's second choice, but nobody's first choice. E is the first candidate eliminated because E got 0% of the vote.
Let's say it shakes out like this:
40% A E C B
21% B E A C
20% D E C B
19% C E D B <- You
40 A D 39 D B 21 B D
60 D 40 A
First round, E is eliminated despite being the most popular candidate by far.
Second Round, C, followed by B. D wins.
But if 3% of A voters switched to C, then A would have won because D would be eliminated, sending their votes to C, which would have eliminated B, sending those votes to A. But D and C voters hate A, so it's in their best interest to also vote for B. And now we're back to fptp
When considering the quality of a voting system, you want voters to be honest (i.e. not strategic in their votes). Voters should pick the candidate they agree with, not the candidates they think they must support to avoid a catastrophe.
First past the post is literally the worst.
A Nice funnel for the public sentiment tho
I agree it does not solve our problem but it would make more than just a marginal difference. It would heavily disincentivize going too far politically one way to win your primary.
As someone who lives in a jurisdiction where every single vote I can engage in is RCV (Australia; NSW) I can honestly say that it’s so much better than FPTP. I don’t know what the perfect voting system is (frankly a subjective topic as it currently stands; please feel free to correct me with statistically valid alternatives) but RCV at the very least means that I can (and personally have) never vote for a major party as #1 and I can know for sure that my vote has never been exhausted, because I’ve never left a blank box. We also have mandatory voting, which helps to keep things sane.
In Australia, government election funding is only ever allocated to the parties based on #1 votes, so I can also confidently say I’ve never contributed to a major party’s election coffers as I’ve also never donated to any major party. I obviously support one major party over the others, as based on my preferences, but I’ll always give the election funding to a smaller party or Independent.
RCV is a wonderful step to take from FPTP. I understand that it may not be democratically perfect, and frankly no representative voting system may ever be, but it’s a far cry better than FPTP. It’s a known concept that here in Australia politicians vie to represent the ‘middle’ rather than the extremes, because the vast majority of voters aren’t overly-enthused political lunatics. We still have our issues to be sure, but I’d rather that the political class fight over the centrist majority rather than court the political extremes in order to convince people to actually vote thanks to mandatory voting.
How come it's still leading to two major parties?
It's still not that old (~10 years or so iirc), it takes time for a third party to be major contentender. Earlier on you're more likely to see third party wins in more local than national level elections.
It's not an insta-win for third parties. But that's ok, because local elections matter, and that's where you'd typically see results first.
We have four Major Parties - Labor, the Liberals, the Nationals, and the Greens. If you understand their relative power based on our system of government, you’ll see that we’re somewhere in between the US and the EU with regards to representational democracy. It’s not great, but in the Anglospheric context we do pretty well because the others don’t have our combination of Ranked Choice Voting (RCV), Proportional Representative Voting (PRV) and Mandatory Voting.
Maybe it's just to me, but liberal/national coalition and labor seem like the two major parties, green is barely at the table still.
If you exclude the coalition, national has 4 times the representation of green, and liberal 3 times that.
Just my opinion here, but it's still two major parties, with the thirds coming up in ranks and getting some momentum going. It'll be a good day imo when the greens overtake the nationals (and maybe one day the liberals), but I personally don't see it as representative of the people yet. Improving, but still functionally two parties.
I guess it depends on your definition of ‘major’. I think in a pluralistic democracy, any party that represents 10+% of the population meets that criteria. Of course, from the perspective of a two-party system 10% doesn’t seem like much, but it’s significant enough to have held the balance of power many times since the Greens came into existence in the ‘90s.
Labor is the largest single party in the Lower House. The Liberal Party has (almost) never gained a true majority. The National Party, with whom the Liberal Party coalesces (known in Australia as The Coalition or the LNP) is our current major opposition, and they only hold that position as a coalition. The Greens regularly poll between 9-12%, which causes our Federal Senate to end up giving them a significant amount of power. We also (thanks to changes a recent government made) have a significant crossbench made up of The Greens, minor parties and independents. Our current senate (and most previous Senates) has many potential ‘kingmakers’ (including previous AFL legend David Pocock, Jacqui Lambie and others) which mean that governments can’t pass legislation without courting those outside their party.
To the outsider it may seem that we only have two parties, but in our context we understand it to be more complex than that. Many Australian jurisdictions have known minority-government, government-by-coalition and Lower House government tempered by Upper House diversity which tempers the passage of legislation.
Like I said, it’s not a perfect system (and pretty far from direct democracy) but we sit in this interesting position between the absolute Two-Party System of FPTP jurisdictions and other systems that produce 5+ parties that need to form government together. Our system is far from perfect, but it’s not terrible.
Long answer, it's complicated as usual. Short answer: single member electorates.
Not surprisingly, the senate (our upper house at the federal level) is much more representative than the lower house, because they have very large, multi-member electorates.
If you live in a safe seat, your vote only counts for election funding (last I checked $2ish per 1st preference).
Trying to demonize one option because you don’t think it’s perfect is just muddying the waters and subjecting us to decades of more of the shit sandwich we have now while we debate which alternative is flawless (hint: none of them are).
I really have been quite surprised over the past eight years or so by how opposed so many people are to any kind of change. I suppose it's because the status quo is working well enough for them, and, I mean, good for them, but I hope they can recognize that not all of us are so lucky.
D.C. deserves statehood.
some people here on Lemmy get upset at any mention of Ranked Choice Voting and respond that, in their opinion, it's not perfect
To those people, I say: do not let perfection be the enemy of progress.
Also, it's absurd, because it's clearly better than what we have now. I suspect many of those people are trolls.
Seeing as how some people here on Lemmy get upset at any mention of Ranked Choice Voting and respond that, in their opinion, it's not perfect, and that we should therefore keep the voting system we have while we debate which alternative is perfect for several decades, allow me to preemptively respond.
The same person will have a melt down at any suggestion of voting third choice because their preferred guy will "lose" a vote or whatever.
These people are bad faith actors or idiots. They are just shilling status quo which is becoming increasingly untenable for anyone who works for money.
I had an argument with someone who said they opposed instant runoff voting because letting people move their votes around is tantamount to giving them extra votes
That's been a continual strategy to try to deter and block RCV. They argued that in front of the courts in Maine when the state moved to RCV.
In the end, I feel there's one big defense: no matter where my vote ends up, I only get one for the last candidate standing that I voted for.
The other voting systems where you rate candidates on a scale, it's a bit muddier as to what a "vote" is. A vote should be your voice that's the same as anyone else's in the electorate. As long as all humans get the same voice, it should be able to take any form.
That definition ("all voters are equal") is a good starting point, but it's also less watertight than it seems. I will show you an obviously unfair system that exploits that definition:
All voters vote for one candidate. The candidate with the second-most votes wins.
I am extremely in favor of RCV as long as it applies to the national level.
It CANNOT end at the state level. If my electoral vote has a chance of being wasted on a 3rd party candidate that has no chance, then the system is EVEN WORSE than our current system.
As an example, if there was a chance that Trump could win because a few electoral votes went to Bernie, I would just put Biden as my first vote. But if the electoral vote would also shift to the next available candidate, then I would vote Bernie first.
Good news! RCV already solves that problem
If Bernie didn't get enough votes to win, the votes for him go to the voters' second choice candidate (Biden – few voters would want Bernie-Trump). If those combined votes are enough for him to win, then Biden wins in that state. In RCV, Trump would only win if people actually preferred him over Biden
My entire comment was addressing that assumption. That assumption requires 2 levels of RCV, state vote and national (electoral) vote.
If RCV was implemented only at the state level, and the state chose Bernie, and that was the end of it, then it would pull electoral votes away from Biden.
If the electoral vote was also allowed to shift after the national electoral total was determined, then it's all good.
Then you may be interested in the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact.
We can't directly institute RCV in the electoral college but we can control how the delegates to the electoral college are pledged. Unfortunately since the 12th amendment we are no longer able to have multiple votes in the EC. It either succeeds or throws the vote to Congress. Which solved the problem at the time but tied our hands now.
I'm actually well aware of that. It's essentially a way to get rid of the electoral college for the popular vote without actually getting rid of the EC. And I'd love for it to be implemented in enough states to work.
However, I think RCV can still work. It's just that the state allocated votes would need to first look at the state level race for president, determine a ranking, then look at the national level race, and allocate to the highest rank that can possibly win.
Oh I agree that it's possible. We're just in the weird position of having to work around the Constitution.
I think the analogy would be a plant-based burger from Beyond or Impossible, but I totally agree with the sentiment!
Anyone arguing FPTP is better than ranked choice is stupid or has sinister motives.