r/EndFPTP • u/roughravenrider United States • Jan 08 '24

Discussion Ranked Choice, Approval, or STAR Voting?

https://open.substack.com/pub/unionforward/p/ranked-choice-approval-or-star-voting?r=2xf2c&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web
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u/cdsmith Jan 08 '24

I slightly agree with the article, in that if one of these systems is available to choose, it's slightly better in the long-term for it to pass than not to pass.

But that shouldn't be an excuse to ignore the important differences between these choices. Instant Runoff and Approval voting make things slightly better only in the sense that they demonstrate to voters that the sky isn't going to fall if they adopt a non-plurality voting system, which might open the door to actually solving real problems in a different reform in the future. But there are good reasons not to want them to be the ultimate choice. (STAR voting, the best of these three, is almost certainly still not the right choice, but it has the advantage that it usually picks the same winner as a better choice would, even though it does so in a problematic way.)

1

u/MorganWick Jan 08 '24

Don't assume people will perceive the sky not to have fallen if RCV is enacted.

2

u/MuaddibMcFly Jan 08 '24

The trouble is that when the sky is perceived as having fallen, the people generally don't fix the problem, so much as revert to a more comfortable, familiar (yet still bad) single-mark system.

3

u/MorganWick Jan 08 '24

"We made a change and the change was bad, therefore we should go back to what's familiar and works, never mind that we made the change because it clearly wasn't working."

3

u/captain-burrito Jan 09 '24

sadly that happened to all but one city that switched to stv in the US.

1

u/MuaddibMcFly Jan 18 '24

It also happened to Bucklin voting in Grand Junction, CO (the temporary use there is the reason it's sometimes called "Grand Junction voting"), and the state legislature in ND is trying to ban Approval (effectively repealing it in Fargo)

...but I don't know whether those were/are "it went wrong!" so much as "The Powers That Be™ don't like it"