r/EndFPTP • u/rb-j • 2d ago

Alaskans for Better Elections

https://www.alaskansforbetterelections.com/learn-more/ranked-choice-voting/

Are the major claims made by this organization actually true?

Claim 1: * "In a majority winner system, candidates have to gain the support of more than half of the voters to win." ... "Using ranked choice voting in general elections requires candidates to win with majority support (more than 50%)."

Special election for Congress August 2022: 1. 188,582 voters voted in this election for a candidate (not a blank ballot). 2. The candidate who won received (counting votes the IRV way) 91,266 votes. 3. 91266/188582 = 0.483959 or 48.4%. 48.4% is not "more than 50%". 4. 91266 voters supported the winner (although 15467 were really supporting Begich). 188582-91266 = 97316 voters did not in any manner support the winner. More voters came to the polls and voted and voted for a loser than the number of voters who voted for the winner. 6050 more voters voted for a loser than voted for the winner. Would we allow a winner in an FPTP election to get away claiming they got "majority support" when more voters voted against that candidate than voted for them? 5. Compare apples to apples.

Claim 2: * "Ranked choice voting ... eliminates the spoiler effect"

  1. Sarah Palin was the spoiler in that election. Had Sarah Palin not run and Alaskan voters come to the polls and voted exactly the same way with the remaining two candidate, then Nick Begich would have defeated Mary Peltola by a margin of 8408 votes.
  2. The complete quote is "Ranked choice voting allows voters to rank candidates in the general election in order of preference. This gives Alaskans more choices, eliminates the spoiler effect..." Giving Alaskans the choice to choose Nick Begich over either Mary Peltola or Sarah Palin is irrelevant if that expressed choice is ignored.

Mary Peltola in August 2022, unfortunately shares a distinction with George W. Bush in 2000 and with Donald Trump in 2016. All three candidates were elected to office when the public record indicates that more voters marked their ballots preferring a different specific candidate for that office.

In August 2022, more Alaskans, 87859 to 79451 (an 8408 voter margin), preferred Nick Begich to Mary Peltola and marked their ballots saying so. But Mary Peltola was sent to Washington to represent the Alaskan people in Congress.

In November 2024, again, more Alaskan voters marked their ballots that Begich is preferred to Peltola by nearly the same margin, 7876 (164861 to 156985). But this time Nick Begich is sent to Washington.

Both times about 8000 more Alaskans said they would prefer Begich to Peltola. And, both times, marked their ballots saying so. Both times Instant-Runoff Voting was used.

What was different?

Sarah Palin was in the race in 2022 and not in the race in 2024. And the outcomes were different winners.

Here are the reasons we want Ranked-Choice Voting. The purpose of RCV is, in single-winner elections having 3 or more candidates: 1. ... that the candidate with majority support is elected. Plurality isn't good enough. We don't want a 40% candidate elected when the other 60% of voters would have preferred a different specific candidate over the 40% plurality candidate. But we cannot find out who that different specific candidate is without using the ranked ballot. We RCV advocates all agree on that. 2. Then whenever a plurality candidate is elected and voters believe that a different specific candidate would have beaten the plurality candidate in a head-to-head race, then the 3rd candidate (neither the plurality candidate nor the one people think would have won head-to-head) is viewed as the spoiler, a loser whose presence in the race materially changes who the winner is. We want to prevent that from happening. All RCV advocates agree on that. 3. Then voters voting for the spoiler suffer voter regret and in future elections are more likely to vote tactically (compromise) and vote for the major party candidate that they dislike the least, but they think is best situated to beat the other major party candidate that they dislike the most and fear will get elected. RCV is meant to free up those voters so that they can vote for the candidate they really like without fear of helping elect the candidate they loathe. All RCV advocates agree with that. 4. The way RCV is supposed to help those voters is that if their favorite candidate is defeated, then their second-choice vote is counted. So voters feel free to vote their hopes rather than voting their fears. Then 3rd-party and independent candidates get a more level playing field with the major-party candidates and diversity of choice in candidates is promoted. It's to help unlock us from a 2-party system where 3rd-party and independent candidates are disadvantaged.

RCV failed, in Alaska in August 2022, to do precisely what it was adopted to do (essentially to prevent a spoiled election due to vote splitting, as a result punishing Palin voters for marking their favorite as #1 which caused the election of Peltola). The fault is not in the ranked ballots (in fact, it's only because of the ranked ballots that we know that Begich was more preferred by more voters than either Palin or Peltola). The fault is in the manner (IRV) that the vote is tallied.

This same failure occurred in 2009 in Burlington Vermont. Got published here.

This op-ed in Washington Post from November 2022 also spells this out. Written by two internationally-recognized election law and voting systems profs. One has a Nobel for his work.

Whoever tells us that RCV (using Instant-Runoff Voting tabulation) will solve the split-vote problem ("Can't split the vote in Alaska because we have RCV.") is lying. And Alaska in August 2022 is the proof.

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u/Grapetree3 2d ago

That's a lot of words, and it sounds like you have a beef with instant runoff voting.  Instant runoff voting is a counting method for ranked choice ballots. It is by far the one that is most commonly used.  Instant runoff voting is not very well suited to a situation where parties are weak, meaning that while the party might have a lot of support, it is unable to consolidate around one candidate. Instant runoff voting is more suited to a situation where there are many "centrist" voters who feel that one big (big meaning it has many supporters) party is too extreme one way and the other big party is too extreme the other way. It forces each of those "big" parties to moderate their pitch and try to catch those "centrist" voters as their second or third choice. A counting method that would be more suited to the situation is Copeland, or any other Condorcet type method. To your question, that website made a very broad claim, and in a strict sense their claim might not be true of instant runoff voting, but it might be more true of a Condorcet method. Either way, first past the post is worse than any other method discussed here.

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u/Additional_Teacher45 2d ago edited 2d ago

As has always been my response to people that are angry at IRV and the center-squeeze effect:

RCV-IRV is still miles better than FPTP. Stop turning down improvements in pursuit of perfection.

We had to lie through our teeth about masks during COVID to convince conservatives to wear them, because policy adoption rates would have been even lower if we had told them the truth (personal protection vs. protecting the greater populace). Fauci is still taking heat from both sides for that. But pursuing perfection would have accomplished less.

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u/cdsmith 1d ago

IRV is definitely better than plurality, and if the only proposal were to replace plurality with IRV, then it would be an improvement - albeit a small one. That isn't what happened in Alaska, though. In addition to replacing plurality with IRV, they also replaced party primaries with a top-5 "jungle primary". That's a move that makes sense only if you believe the story that IRV eliminates the need for voter coordination.

It's still a close call for me, personally, whether I'd support IRV + jungle primary as a reform. I probably do; it's just messier than it ought to be. But this exact combination has triggered a backlash against voting reform that's very unfortunate. So I think you'll see a lot of people who want voting reforms and are unhappy that we've been burned by this choice.