Ranked-Choice Voting, Explained in 60 Seconds

Ranked-choice voting. You’ve probably been hearing about it, but how does it work, and why are places like New York City using it to decide their elections? Ranked-choice voting can seem confusing at first, but it’s a common sense reform to primary elections with more than two candidates.

[waspwrap]

How about using five star voting, where you rank each candidate out of five stars. It allows for the benefits of a cruel voting where are you can vote for two candidates at an equal level, but also the benefits of rank choice voting where you can support some more than others.

[deethy]

Mmm, Rum and Raison….you’ve got my vote!😋

[aresmars]

Ranked Choice Voting is GREAT! But it must be done right. We need to eliminate partisan primaries and instead use open/blanket primaries where all candidates are on the same ballot and all voters decide who the top candidates are. NOW, two parties can have tiny fraction of voters in partisan primaries choose candidates, and then we're stuck between extreme-A, extreme-B and no viable candidates between. An open RCV primary could eliminate the weakest candidates until all have at least 20%. Then if the prolife extremists get their 20% candidate in (which happens all the time in partisan primaries) the more moderate candidate in the party can still advance to the general election, if he/she can also get 20% primary threshold. That gives voters up to 4 choices in the general election and fall debates to let all voters evaluate them all. Presidential primaries are more troubled but we still could have an August Presidential open primary so we could advance say Sanders, Biden, Trump and voters would have a choice between 3 old white men. OOPS, well, getting diversity is still going to take some work.

[OrenLikes]

This and Approval Voting are much better than the "regular" voting.
This is about one winner.
What about seats in a parliament (unfortunately, by voting/selecting parties and not people)?

[bigdre]

If it goes to a 3rd round, do they use the 3rd choice on the ballot of the candidate that was eliminated first ?

[kriswilliams]

It’s bs. The person with the most % after 1st choice should win.

[rumdog]

Love your channel, but have to ask. How does ranked voting help the left more than the right. One thing I could see is that with the republican party being mainly older people and the democratic party being younger, maybe the older people can't understand it. I give older people the the benefit that they can learn it see how it works and what it cam do for the people. It's been around since the 13th century and goes back to 1912 in the US. It has been repeatedly found constitutional and in a country where one party has constantly fought against making voting day a holiday so more people can vote, it is a way to essentially do a run off that everyone has the chance to vote in.

[Jose]

It's better and I like, it but it's not a Panacea. This works with candidates in the same party (primaries), or just one candidate per party. Also, It doesn't solve the problem with a heavy gerrymandered districts. Solution? You also need to get rid of districts and distribute the seats proportionally, like Germany. You need two elections, the first one to get an order of priority candidates using ranked choice (public primaries). Then another ranked choice election with the parties, not the candidates. Dependeding of how many seats a party got in the second election, fill those seats using that list of priority of the first (primary) election.

[matthewmcgee]

So according to this explanation, you have 4 people running on the ideology of strawberry, and 1 person who wants to make a change gets the majority vote. Now the strawberry party can eliminate the popular vote to maintain control?

[CowboyTech]

Wow, Rolling Stone readers cannot be all that bright if you are using ice cream as an example.

[kb]

Way to centralized and way to many hands on ballots

[CavemanSynthesizer]

You would think an explainer piece would go into both the pros and cons of ranked choice voting. This comes off more as an advocacy piece than a neutral explainer.

[myeyeglassclub]

The ice cream example is misleading. Party politics is different then desert politics because people are often aligned with a party.. not desert choice. People register for a party, and they often vote based on party lines. If a town predominantly leans 60/40 toward a particular party this will insure the party always wins as opposed to the most popular candidate. I think elections should be a referendum on the best candidate, not the most popular party... Rank choice voting is sure to discourage voting because if your person is in the less popular party, their odds just got a whole lot smaller...In short, I like strawberry ice cream, but occasionally I WANT SOME DAM RUM RAISIN TOO..

[verihimthered]

I know a country that did this in the 1930, I think it was next to poland.

[buckiemohawk]

rank choice voting is the biggest scame EVER

[alitlweird]

If Rolling Stone is in favor of it, then I know I should vote “No” on Question 3.
Thanks, RS!

[SassInYourClass]

Ranked Choice (Instant Runoff) Voting does NOT eliminate vote splitting or the spoiler effect. Exhausted ballots, limited ranking slots, thrown out ranks, and a variety of other problems ensure this method, which is literally just our current Choose-one Voting method iterated over and over again, promotes the same polarizing effects we’ve always dealt with.

Voting methods like STAR Voting and Approval Voting, among others, ACTUALLY deal with these issues in a simple, securable fashion that uses ALL of the voter preference data to find accurate winners. If you want to get out of the duopoly, Ranked Choice (Instant Runoff) Voting will not help.

[MusikCassette]

Instand run off is not the only ranked choice voting. It s even one of the worst ones out there. It is quite misleading to call it so.

[XIIchiron]

Ranked Choice (Instant Runoff) is a disaster. You can't solve FPTP by doing it more times in a row. The spoiler effect exists in each round, and niche candidates often eliminate popular ones with large second choice support. Not only does it not fix anything; it obfuscates the problems from the voter, leading them to make bad choices, all while being incredibly difficult and expensive to run (as we saw in NYC). And that's the tip of the iceberg - there is also non-monotonicity, non-precint summability, ballot exhaustion and spoilage, lack of transparency, and more.

We need real solutions like STAR or Approval. Check out the Equal Vote Coalition and Center for Election Science if you want real change.

[clayfouts]

Say there are 20 flavors to choose from. A few people choose strawberry as their first pick, a few choose salted caramel, or vanilla, so on. But every person chooses chocolate as their 2nd. What happens? Chocolate is eliminated in the very first round. RCV's runoff process immediately eliminates the broadly appealing flavor.