~~House speaker~~ elections can be better with ranked choice voting
this post was submitted on 18 Oct 2023
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I'm not sure if the Author just doesn't understand the situation or is misrepresenting it on purpose.
Either way, a lack of STV isn't the reason the House Speaker election is going this way. Republican members who are not voting for "the Republican Candidate" know their vote is a protest/obstruction. If the House had RCV, the Speaker Pro Tempore wouldn't call a vote until the Republicans had the vote, lest Hakeem Jeffries be elected Speaker.
I fully support Ranked Choice, Instant Run-off, Mixed-Member Proportional, etc., but this is not a supporting case
Right, it's not like any of the voters would cross party lines. That's the enemy. You can't vote for the enemy. They're evil. They want to destroy us. We must destroy them first, even if it kills all of you.
If the House had RCV, the Speaker Pro Tempore wouldn’t call a vote until the Republicans had the vote, lest Hakeem Jeffries be elected Speaker.
This would only happen if some Republicans ranked Jeffries above a Republican. I imagine most of the holdouts would have ranked Scalise higher than Jeffries on the first vote. Alternately if given the option they might rank no one other than their first choice and we'd still be in the same place.
Hakeem Jefferies could win without Republican voters if enough of them ran through their lists and were effectively voting, "Present."
If that was how the system defined an exhausted ranking, then they wouldn't vote that way. Implementing RCV would be a rule change that would also define how the system works with exhausted votes. And everyone would vote under those rules, which wouldn't end with a surprise Democratic win.
How would that work then in your rule change? Currently, all Representative are eligible so it's possible to have >400 runoffs. Would all members have to rank all members? Would you introduce some sort of nomination requirement?
Not the person you responded to but I think there are some systems where your last choice can be a "party" rather than a person.
There are lots of options. Someone else mentioned a default option (something like "whoever in my party has the most votes"), or simply making an exhausted vote just continue as a vote for their final choice (which prevents the plurality win mentioned above). And you wouldn't need 400 runoffs, they could just nominate valid options beforehand and require ranking everyone. These are choices that would need to be defined in setting up RCV.
And even if the rule was "exhaustion = voting present", Republicans would almost certainly vote for the Republican they dislike rather than risking a plurality Democratic speaker. They're voting for random other people now to force a change of choice, but if it was resolving one way or another all at once, their choices would be different.
The suggestion is that there would still be a Republican speaker, but that a different consensus candidate would win.
That said, in the Raskin/Beyer op-ed that FairVote references, they talk about people being required to list a second choice, which would certainly work but of course isn't required in normal elections.
It's naive to think a consensus candidate would win with STV when they wouldn't with the current system. The majority party controls when the vote is called and if they'd hold until they knew the outcome.
The second choice option is too easy to game. Choose 2 obscure members and you're effectively voting, "Present."
This is assuming those voting would rank their choices, they won't.
They would be required to if the rules were changed.
You don't have to have a ranking if you vote for one person once. You can't "force" a person to vote.
Yes they can. They can 100% change the voting procedure to require a vote or an abstention. In a ranked choice vote, they can be required to rank all potential options.
Even changing rules to make speaker whomever gets most votes first would reduce this to single election.
The problem is that Republicans vote this way out of protest and to force their choice on majority.
If there was RCV they would simply do all this privately and hold vote once they got to agreement or were giving up.
That doesn’t make sense. They don’t even have consensus right now within their party to vote in a FPTP system. You think they’d be able to coalesce around multiple people, in the same order?
The whole point of RCV is that internally it is equivalent of running multiple runoff elections, each time eliminating the lowest performer.
Republicans right now can run as many speaker elections as they want.
If they had a goal to conclude it then Gym Jordan would get more votes in every run.
You're right, because voting for speaker is more charged/personal, I could see it not working. See my other comment here, the idea isn't that a democrat or independent would win, just that you'd have a less bonkers candidate or at least wouldn't be deadlocked.
Basketball teams would score more points if they all worked together instead of trying to stop each other.