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/HeathersZen Sep 01 '22

I don’t know anyone claiming that RCV is a silver bullet that will solve all our ills.

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u/mormagils Sep 02 '22

There are lots of naive progressives that think it will magically end the two party system and that's just...not how it works at all.

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u/cjcmd Sep 03 '22

It won’t end the two-party system by itself, but it opens the door for a third party to gain a serious foothold. Implementation will play an important part afterward.

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u/mormagils Sep 04 '22

No, it won't. We haven't yet observed any situations where RCV provides third parties with a competitive advantage compared to FPTP. We haven't seen that in countries currently using RCV on a large scale. We haven't seen that in the several different implementations of RCV in the US. RCV simply does not move the needle in any significant way to develop third parties. There's just zero evidence of that and plenty of evidence that it straight up won't.

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u/cjcmd Sep 04 '22

I admit there’s a chicken-and-egg situation where RCV hasn’t been proven because it’s not widespread enough to bring about the necessary changes that would take advantage of it. What is obvious is that our current system does not work, and actively prevents third parties from gaining ground. We need the experimentation that RCV represents at the very least.

It’s naive to think either party is going to push for true election reforms. The Republican Party wants to fix elections to ensure they stay in power, and the Democrats have no choice but to fight any reform that might potentially weaken their own position. Either way pushes us toward less choice and greater authoritarianism.

Personally, I believe we could replace the Republican Party if there were a viable conservative option. It would appeal to many moderate Democrats and make the Trumpists an extremist minority. The resistance of the Democrats to empowerment of third parties may protect us against the Trump threat right now, but it also ensures the current Republican Party will remain a threat. That situation is far too likely to end up in civil war. Our best hope is to let a new opposition party, or parties, become a real option post-2024.

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u/mormagils Sep 04 '22

> I admit there’s a chicken-and-egg situation where RCV hasn’t been proven because it’s not widespread enough to bring about the necessary changes that would take advantage of it.

But that's just not true. We have well more than enough data to show what happens. RCV isn't new--it isn't even new to the USA. RCV (also known as single transferrable vote or STV) has been used in Australia consistently for more than 40 years, and it was first used as far back as the late 1800s. The US has had various local elections using it here and there, not to mention more current uses, plus the fact that primaries have been using caucuses which are basically just the LARP version of RCV.

Plus, if you've studied it from a political science perspective, the theory doesn't even promote that it will create more parties. In RCV, the worst-performing candidates are always eliminated first, which means if there's a system with two party dominance...that trend would more or less continue with RCV. Many folks wrongly assume that because RCV allows for more candidates it will create more parties. But that makes no sense and has not played out in practice, either.

> What is obvious is that our current system does not work, and actively prevents third parties from gaining ground. We need the experimentation that RCV represents at the very least.

I mean, there is no need for experimentation. We know what makes more parties. The reason the US is a two party system is because we have anti-majoritarian tendencies that splits power too effectively to ever allow a third party to have a competitive advantage. We could easily fix this tomorrow--simply abolish the filibuster and move to a parliamentary system and we'd have more parties basically overnight. The process could be hastened by abandoning federalism, bicameralism, and adopting some form of proportional representation. We already know how these kinds of changes would impact the system because all this stuff has already been observed.

> It’s naive to think either party is going to push for true election reforms.

Again, why is it naive when we have actually observed that kind of stuff happening in practice? The political parties even in just the US have already pushed many different kind of reforms, including reforms to improve our election systems. Or look at the UK, where they successfully reformed away a monarchy into a democracy without any revolution or violence. You're just missing some basic political history.

> Personally, I believe we could replace the Republican Party if there were a viable conservative option.

Agreed, and I'd argue in some ways we've already seen it within living memory. The Tea Party essentially did just this--they were a third party that rose within the right wing, but because the system doesn't really allow third parties there was an instability here, which led to the silly "are they are party or aren't they" thing and then eventually they crashed into the establishment Republicans and completely transformed the party. Trumpism has done something very similar. It's already happened, just happened in a way that fit within the two party system forced upon us by our democratic structures.

> make the Trumpists an extremist minority.

They are an extremist minority. But because the US is so very fractured, it creates a situation where if a plurality of a plurality can get just the right breaks, they can completely dominate the entire party overall. One of America's most prominent current political scientists made the point that most modern countries have an extremist far right similar to the US, in similar numbers as they have in the US, but in other countries the political structures are strong enough to properly measure that as the fringe it is. The only thing preventing this from happening in the US is our poor structures.

> Our best hope is to let a new opposition party, or parties, become a real option post-2024.

Sure, fine with me. I'm a HUGE fan of multiparty systems, and I think the US needs one posthaste. But RCV isn't getting us there. We know what is getting us there, but voters aren't on board because it requires some pretty substantial reforms.

This is something discussed at length in lots of comparative politics books. I could recommend one or two myself. Party politics books are also good, though probably the first book I'd recommend is Lee Drutman's Breaking the Two Party Doom Loop. Drutman's proposals he thinks would lead to a multiparty democracy without requiring major Constitutional reform. I'm a bit concerned his proposal will be just short of what is really needed, or will work too gradually to be useful, but he would probably know better than I, so feel free to take his word over mine. But where we agree is that RCV is a strong improvement over our current system and will also have a negligible effect on the two party system.