If you live in New Hampshire, I suggest you call your state legislators to support this bill. Approval Voting is a very small change that goes a long way! If you don’t live in New Hampshire, send this to someone who does!
If you live in New Hampshire, I suggest you call your state legislators to support this bill. Approval Voting is a very small change that goes a long way! If you don’t live in New Hampshire, send this to someone who does!
Ranked Choice is objectively worse because it breaks down when there’s a popular third party, meaning it doesn’t really solve the spoiler effect. Basically, your secondary vote won’t count until your primary is knocked out, and your #2 could very well be the most popular candidate (i.e. maybe a ton of people have the same #2, but their #1 outlives the #2, so the #2 drops out first).
Approval voting is great because there cannot be a spoiler effect (candidate with the most votes wins). However, the third party candidate probably won’t win unless they draw heavily from both sides. What you’ll likely end up with is a lot of moderate winners, which isn’t the worst thing in the world imo.
STAR voting is even better because it takes preference into account, just like RCV, but without missing votes. So every candidate you vote for will get that vote counted, regardless of what position you put them in. This means popular third parties will have a much better chance because they don’t need to outlast the major party candidates to get counted, they just need a lot of votes.
I highly recommend looking at a few comparisons online. I’ve found a few great YouTube videos, but I don’t want to accidentally bias things by pointing to a biased source, so go look for yourself. My personal preference is:
But all of them are better than FPTP, so I’ll vote for whichever gets on the ballot.
That’s not true. I literally just described how the spoiler effect occurs in approval voting. And if the votes for number two remain locked behind number one in RCV then number 2 wasn’t the most popular candidate. Number 1 was. Number 2 is ranked lower for a reason. That’s the entire point of RCV.
Star is just approval voting with an extra round. RCV works, is in use, and is popular where it’s in use.
No, and here’s a clear example:
In this matchup, C is eliminated in the first round and A ends up winning after D is eliminated. However, C got 10 votes to A’s 7, so C should’ve won.
This is obviously contrived (I spent like 10 seconds thinking of it), but hopefully it illustrates the point. A popular third option that could win with Approval voting could lose with RCV. And C would win under STAR voting as well.
Nope. The entire point is that C was not popular enough to rank higher on ballots. The A votes were never going to C because A won. The most C was going to get was 6. The A voters preferred that candidate over C.
The way you want to look at RCV requires counting some people twice.
No, what’s going on is that more people preferred C than any other candidate, they just didn’t mark them first. A and B had equivalent first round votes, and B only wins because of second round votes. If we looked at an second round votes in the second round votes when the first round didn’t pick a winner, C would’ve won.
B only wins because strategic voting messed things up.
There are plenty of other ways I could twist the votes to the point where it’s really not clear if RCV actually represents the will of the people in a contested election.
Approval is clear: most votes wins. STAR is nice in that every vote counts, not just when your front-runner is knocked out. RCV pretends to give you options, but if you pick a poor preferred candidate, you could lose pretty much any say in the election, so it can end up worse than FPTP in the public’s eyes in certain elections.
They didn’t mark them first because they wanted A over C. Which is the entire point. In this scenario Biden could easily be C, the safety pick, and you’d be arguing that he was what everyone actually wanted. Against all polling. That’s the entire point of RCV.
With STAR, Approval, and Single Vote, your still asking people to not vote for a safety candidate in order to give their preferred candidate the best chance. People understand this and the 2 places that used Approval voting saw people voting for one person still because it’s not hard to understand. Approval voting’s theory is dependent on people voting in a specific way that just does not happen.
One thing is for certain, if you pull apart the rounds in RCV you can certainly pretend it’s not clear that the will of the people was served.
You can also have cases where the most preferred candidate won’t win. For example:
In this case, B wins, but A has more primary votes, and C would’ve won if A happened to be knocked out. So those who voted for A aren’t getting their voices heard. I think most would agree that either A or C should win here, not B.
I think this video does a good job comparing each of the voting systems.
This site is also great, but a bit biased toward STAR.
Sorry. I stopped watching your video the second he used the propaganda line about people being overwhelmed by ranking candidates. RCV is in large use and there’s no evidence that happens. Yet it keeps being trotted out.
Also, while I appreciate you trying to find a win condition I would object to, in this 2 round election C and B voters obviously make up a coalition. Like Democrats and Progressives. Saying A voters weren’t listened to is about as irrational as saying Trump voters weren’t listened to because he lost.
Edit - Also, holy crap dude, did you really pause that video so it only cues up on his criticism of ranked choice voting? Completely missing his praise?
Here’s the actual start of Mr beasts RCV voting section.
No, I think that video is pretty fair and unbiased, hence why I linked it. I’m not trying to say RCV is bad or anything, just that I think it’s not as good as approval or STAR.
I think RCV will do little to break the 2-party system because major party candidates are likely to have the most #1 votes because people are lazy. Approval and STAR both count #2 votes, so they find the candidate tolerable by most, which I believe will result in more frequently electing popular third party candidates, which is my personal goal here.
I think the FairVote website is incredibly biased toward their system, largely relying on its popularity instead of its merits, and it’s popular because it was first (and it has a good name). I used to be a strong proponent, until I really looked at other options and became unhappy with how winners are selected. The second link was the main thing that convinced me, but like Fair vote’s website, it’s a bit biased, but I did enjoy the video that covered each fairly.