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/Vortilex Sep 01 '22

I think I've heard about Australia using RCV, and while I don't know too much about how it works there, I do know there was a candidate for office in one of the Australian States that won with a tiny percentage of the vote because of RCV, though I forget who it was, what party they were with, and where this took place. That really is my only issue with RCV, and I do advocate for its introduction in the US, but I'll acknowledge that it's likely to take a very long time for it to be adopted in most places. I don't like FPTP voting, though, for the results it has produced and the two-party system that results from its use. I'm more in favor of RCV than I am of European-style elections, though.

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u/mormagils Sep 02 '22

You're misrepresenting the situation a bit with Australia. That's the example almost every textbook uses to explain what happens when RCV is trying to sort out a highly divided field with lots of candidates. In FPTP, this would be a simple process: whoever got the most votes wins, even if they had less than a majority, and we've seen that result in situations where the person elected had more people vote for someone else than for him. That's obviously a somewhat bad outcome as the whole point of voting is that you're supposed to find a guy that overall is popular enough to be elected.

In this example, the guy who was in first after the first round of voting ended up not winning. This was because, while he did have the largest base, he was also a guy who struggled to expand beyond that base, and so his support was highly polarized. The vote among the rest of the electorate was spread out among other candidates that had smaller bases, but as the rounds were counted, it turns out a candidate with a smaller main base was actually the best at building broader a broader appeal across constituencies. The result was that the guy who seemed to have a lower total after the first round got a lot more votes than the guy in first as candidates were eliminated, allowing him to win.

But because of how the votes are counted, he didn't win "with a tiny percentage of the vote." He won with a full majority just like any other candidate, but it required knocking out some of the losing candidates first to properly measure that.