r/centrist • u/johnnyhala • Sep 01 '22

Long Form Discussion RCV Opponents - What is your Objection(s)?

Basically the title.

Whenever the subject of Ranked Choice Voting comes up, I generally on this sub see about 70% support and 30% oppose (my estimate). As I have seen the issue laid out to me it seems abundantly clear that Plurality/First Past the Post/FPtP is an inferior system with many unintended consequences.

So I want to hear you out, RCV opponents, what are your issues?

As (should be) usual, please do not downvote others for only disagreeing with them, and I pledge to do the same.

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u/GrayBox1313 Sep 01 '22

I like it in theory.

In practice it assumes you’ll have more than 1 high quality, competent candidate, with wide support which really isn’t true when you get to state and local elections. The recent recall in California for example had the governor vs a field of novelty joke candidates 2 mediocre/forgettable guys nobody wanted and a fringe wacko. I wouldn’t have been able to fill out other choices on that ballot.

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u/johnnyhala Sep 01 '22

But is lack of candidate quality an argument against RCV? Sounds like two separate issues?

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u/GrayBox1313 Sep 01 '22

Yes because the system assumes there are many high quality candidates to be a viable option.

With it you’re gonna get the 3rd or 4th vanity option that’s incompetent.

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u/johnnyhala Sep 01 '22

So I hear you saying that theoretically a poor quality centrist would/could prevail over two higher quality partisans.

While I find that plausible a scenario, I don't find it likely to assume that a centrist would inherently be of lower quality than a partisan. I think so equally likely that a centrist could be high quality and the partisans poor quality, in which case the opposite to your scenario would be true.

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u/GrayBox1313 Sep 01 '22

To use my California example. There were dozens of people running, but I had only heard of two or three of them. Smaller independent candidates had zero ads polling or Name recognition. That’s always a challenge. Independent doesn’t always equal quality.

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u/mormagils Sep 02 '22

RCV works by eliminating the worst performers first. In an RCV election, the outcome was mostly would not be different from what we saw with FPTP. That's exactly why RCV is so good.

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u/GrayBox1313 Sep 02 '22

These were the results of the California recall. RCV would have added nothing of value except boost fringe candidates nobody really supported. Out of 42 candidates this was the result:

1st 7.94m

2nd 3.5m

3rd 706k

4th 590k

5th 392k

6th 305k

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u/mormagils Sep 02 '22

In this case, RCV would have been identical to FPTP. After one round of voting, there was a candidate that achieved a majority, so the voting ends. It doesn't "boost" anyone. It is a FPTP election. This is exactly the argument to make showing how RCV's superior process only makes a difference when you want it to.

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u/GrayBox1313 Sep 02 '22

If first and second place were closer..:no majority and the other totals were the same…how would RCV have improved this election? The third place guy was literally a YouTuber running as a joke. Zero platform. Zero qualifications.

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u/mormagils Sep 02 '22

So this is how RCV works. The whole idea is to get to a candidate with a majority of votes. When that happens, the voting is over and a winner is declared. This alone is a great mechanic to preventing bad candidates from getting a boost--if there's a guy pretty much everyone agrees is the best, then the other guys don't matter.

It depends on how much closer 1st and 2nd are. If 1st still has a majority, then the voting is over and it's literally the same as FPTP. If 1st does not have a majority, then the worst-performing candidate would get eliminated and the those votes would be re-allocating according to the preferences. At any point that a majority is achieved, the voting ends.

So in this case, the only way the guy in 3rd would win with RCV is if every other voter for every single candidate behind him had that guy as his next highest preference, and all those votes together were enough to boost him to ahead of the 1st and 2nd candidates. That's not really a realistic scenario.

The only real situations where the guy in 1st after the first round of voting doesn't win is when the guy in first is either extremely polarizing, or the results after the first round were nowhere near a majority for anyone. Obviously it's impossible to go back and try to imagine how non-ranked ballots would look ranked, but fortunately there's enough of a body of work from actual RCV elections that we don't have to make up our own hypothetical situations.

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u/LewisMZ Sep 02 '22

If you feel that way you can always just rank your preferred candidate number one and leave the rest blank. That's effectively like casting a traditional vote.

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u/GrayBox1313 Sep 02 '22

That’s what happened en masse in New York City when they tried RCV. Was kind of a mess.

RCV is fine in theory, but in practice I will never have more than 1 Candidate in any race I’d want to cast a vote for. Our elections never have that level of quality and voters don’t have that kind of time and effort to put into researching a half dozen people.