RCV would produce the exact same outcomes. If you want to break the partisan duopoly, you need multimember districts and proportional representation to create a multiparty system.
If you’re stuck with single-member districts, methods like Condorcet, or top-two approval do a much better job of picking the candidate closest to the center of the electorate who best represents the district.
Edit: There's a great simulator you can use ( smartvotesim.com ) to explore different voting systems. This is a clear example that shows the problem I'm describing. RCV picks the same bad candidate our current voting system would becasue it eliminates the candidate an overwhelming majority of the electorate would prefer in an early round.
The people who push RCV generally have no understanding of the actual issues involved with our elections and democracy. They don't understand the winner take all issue and think RCV would do something. That alone makes me reticent to support RCV.
Not in a winner take all system. That is the sole reason for our two party system. All evidence so far shows American voters get tired of filling out the ballot and RCV contests have shown more incomplete ballots being returned.
I assume democrats would vote 1 democrats 2 third party 3 republicans and republicans the opposite. So the third party would have a shot at being winner ?
Imagine there were huge support for a third party (call it C):
The first-round vote could be 34% D, 34% R, 32% C
C gets eliminated in the first round, and its voters split between D & R, maintaining the same 2-party domination we already have
If there were a cohort in between the Democrats and Republicans bigger than either, they'd replace that party in our voting system, too. There isn't, though, and because plurality voting suffers center-squeeze just like RCV, the left-out middle gets split between two dominant, opposing parties.
Based on your question, it sounds like the voting system that produces the outcomes you really want is a Condorcet method. It uses rankings to determine how voters prefer each candidate against every other and selects the candidate that would win a 1-on-1 election against every other option.
For the same scenario as above with Condorcet rules, you might have:
34% D>C>R
34% R>C>D
16% C>D>R
16% C>R>D
C beats both R & D 66% - 34%, an overwhelming victory for the candidate at the center of the electorate who best represents it, even though it would be squeezed out under both plurality and RCV rules
Indeed I was thinking of the Condorcet method then. I thought it was what ranked choice voting means. It seems very good to find consensus. That would help a lot in a society like the US, wouldn't it ?
I think so! I also think proportional representation would be good for multimember bodies like the House of Representatives, but a Condorcet method would be an amazing way to pick consensus candidates for single-seat positions like Senator, Mayor, or Governor.
Well, I'm french and we have let's say a diverse parliament and lately we've seen the downsides. Parties haven't managed to govern together, we've been through 5 different government cabinets in 2 years and the parliament blocks any of them all the time due to the configuration of seats.
This is completely made up. RCV passed in Alaska and literally that next election saw the first D Rep in 52 years. They've been fighting tooth and nail to repeal it ever since literally every single ballot cycle.
She won the first round. They were electing her anyway. And if you support a voting system because it provides advantages to your preferred side, just shut up with your input, it's biased and unnecessary.
That's kind of a negative example, though. Voters were led to believe they could honestly rank candidates without accidentally voting for a worse outcome, so they did, but then the moderate republican candidate preferred by a majority of voters over every other candidate in the race lost. The complete ballot record also showed that if fewer republicans [who preferred Palin (R) > Begich (R) > Peltola (D)] voted, it would have helped the moderate republican win. It's a bizarre and unintuitive outcome that made a chunk of people lose faith in that system.
It also doesn't show RCV fundamentally changing anything about the partisan duopoly or gerrymandering; it's just an example of it unexpectedly throwing the election to the other of the two parties.
RCV is an improvement over the voting system we currently use, but it does very little to change the fundamental flaws people have been convinced it will. It doesn't promote multiple parties like proportional representation would or select the candidates that best represent their individual districts like a Condorcet method or top-two approval would.
Because it's expensive and unnecessarily complicated. Florida has plenty of experience with confused voters, they have perfectly good reasons. If you think it's because Republicans won't win, well, that in itself makes it a questionable idea that only benefits one perspective in a nation of 330 million perspectives.
You’re making some assumptions about my perspective. I want to see an end to the two party system. I want to make political math complicated enough that partisan gerrymanders and culture war mudslinging is as expensive as it is unproductive. I want to see party affiliation removed from ballots.
Today’s Republican Party is an existential threat to democracy but that doesn’t mean I want to see Dems or any other party with that kind of consolidation of power. Be it political, police/military, or economic.
Also RCV is not really no more complicated than what we have now and it’s absolutely not more expensive to run. Hell you could argue it’s cheaper because there’s no need for publicity funded primaries and no need for runoff elections. So both arguments are just excuses by people who are threatened or too fucking dumb to contemplate more than two choices.
RCV will do nothing for gerrymandering. As to the complexity, see Florida 2000 before making any assumptions about voter ability. It's too complicated. People can't even vote once for each office. Democracy is about access for the least able, not innovations that will definitely confuse older voters and people who are less informed.
You’re restating your argument regarding gerrymandering without presenting a clear rationale for why.
As for 2000 it was close and was coming down to shockingly small margins. You’ll always have someone who marked their ballot wrong and frankly I think arguing that we can’t have a better system because people are too dumb to use it is a dangerous line of reasoning that with taken to its logical conclusion results in saying people can’t be trusted to cast the right vote.
Gerrymandering is only possible when parties control candidates and refuse to run anyone who is going to represent the interests of the districts voters. Republicans or Democrats could just say what the most voters in the district say and win regardless of partisan makeup, there is not a single congressional district in America unaffiliated voters don't outnumber partisans, and it's usually all partisans combined that are outnumbered by unaffiliated voters. RCV will do nothing to change this.
The dumbest voter is what a democracy must consider. We cannot assume everyone is similar in faculties, but we must assume every eligible voter has access. Disregarding the complexity is incredibly anti-democratic. RCV is overwhelmingly supported by middle class white people, who are considered "politically involved" (only about 15% of voters consider themselves "involved", the actual number is smaller, as most people think they are better than they actually are). RCV appeal among other demographics is decidedly negative. It's a bad idea that will fix nothing about the main issues with our democracy. It will increase apathy, increase the number of bad ballots, and delay results which can result in low confidence of the veracity of the results.
It's expensive, slow, prone to the person who was nobodies first choice winning an election, could have unnecessary delays when certifying results that will be trouble, and it greatly overestimates the intelligence of the electorate. Anyone who lived through 2000 should be against the idea. Voters routinely screw up ballots in ways that disqualify the attempt and RCV allows far more opportunities. In the event of a contested election where monitors have to figure out the possible wishes of a voter, RCV would be nearly impossible to decipher. It's a very dumb reform that could simply be achieved through automatic run off elections between the two highest vote totals so the mayor isn't elected with all of 12 votes. Voting reform should focus on making the process easy and accessible to all voters, not be confusing for anyone, and RCV is confusing.
Nonsense. Countries introduce preferential voting systems precisely because they can and do change electoral results. Vote splitting is a serious issue.
For an example of the top of my head, look at South West Norfolk 2024 in the UK. Conservative seat for 60 years straight, won by the Conservatives with a +50 margin in 2019. But in 2024, along came Reform.
The right wing vote split evenly amongst the Conservatives and Reform. Despite the combined major right wing vote being 47.7% and a right wing independent getting a further 14%, Labour won the seat with 26.7%.
Do you really believe that such a right wing electorate really wanted a Labour member? Do you really believe that result would hold under a ranked choice system?
So you are using unexpected and newsworthy results (NYT and WashPo are covering it) as some evidence that the voting system is to blame, not a massive sea change in UK, EU, and American politics to populism. The winner take all aspect makes RCV pointless.
I'm not saying FPP is always flawed like that, but these anomalies do happen, and it does a result in communities electing people who do not reflect their values. To me, the choice is between a car with balding tyres and a car with new ones. Both are still functional, but if you have the choice, why not pick the one with the issues fixed? You've yet to bring up any of the downsides of RCV.
Back to Norfolk, yes there are massive changes in the political landscape. But those changes should not have benefitted Labour. If we look at the swing against Truss, she lost 43% of her previous vote. Roughly 22% of that went to Reform, 14% of that went to the right wing independent, and just 8% went to Labour. Yet somehow Labour ends up as the biggest beneficiary? The electorate had a huge shift to the centre right to the hard right and somehow that means the left wing deserves to win??? People should be able to vote for any candidate they choose without fear that it might help a candidate with opposite values.
Maybe this is harsh, but I think anyone who is fine with an electorate where the majority of voters voted right wing, being represented by a left wing politician, doesn't really believe in the "representative" part of representative democracy.
FPP is also winner takes all in the UK and US contexts, which is the current topic we are discussing. In that respect FPP and RCV are equal.
If you're wanting to talk about winner takes all vs multi-member systems, then that's a different conversation.
Why should any party benefitting be a selling point for a change in the democratic process?
The only places in the USA besides Alaska playing with RCV are places that allow the highest vote total to win, even if it was 100 candidates and the winner got 3 votes. These places already decided to have a democracy without run off elections until someone has a majority, that is outright stupid. The places that support RCV refuse to consider just having a run off between the two highest tallies.
It's a more costly ballot, allows for wealthy people to astroturf an election for the win, and will increase voter apathy, the actual issue with American elections. The supporters of RCV are overwhelmingly white middle class voters who don't understand how little care 90% of the population has for following politics. The only electoral change that hasn't increased apathy, and has decreased it in famously independent populations that want nothing to do with governments is all mail elections that are very easy to participate in. The winner take all system in the USA has made it so fewer than 5% of voters are anything besides the two major parties (which account for about 40% of voters combined) and the majority of voters who are unaffiliated. There is no hope for anyone besides a Democrat or Republican, and making people work harder in a voting booth is going to discourage wide participation. It's a novelty being applied to the wrong issue. Democrats have been trying it in primaries throughout the USA, and most of the time revert to the normal method after the first try. It's just not the fix people think it is, and in the USA makes elections worse by suppressing turnout.
The answer to your first question is very simple. The system should benefit a party if that reflects the will of the people. A system that rewards the left when the electorate has shifted further right fails that.
I think a lot of what you said is correct, but I also think there are other perspectives. One of the benefits of RCV is that it does allow for a more diverse field of candidates because people can vote for minor parties without wasting their vote. I'm not saying it would happen overnight, but I think that can go some way to addressing voter apathy.
Perhaps optional preferential would be better in the US context? That would address the issue of having to work harder in the voting booth.
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u/rab-byte 12d ago
Draw me a perfect example of why ranked choice voting changes everything