Ranked Choice Voting - The Promise and Reality

Voting reform advocate and Equal Vote Coalition Founder/Volunteer Mark Frohnmayer does the deep dive on Ranked Choice Voting, looking at the core promises of its advocates, how the method actually works, and potential reforms that deliver on the heartfelt goals of voting reform advocates. Let's go!

[dms]

STAR voting is superior to Ranked Choice Voting. I’d vote for it if it were placed on the ballot. The recent RCV measure vote in OR will increase the difficulty of STAR getting on the ballot. Portland’s confusing RCV election in Nov of 2024 will also complicate support for STAR. That’s a shame.

[MeldaRavaniel]

Thanks for this. I used to be a volunteer with RCV but took the time to work through some examples by myself (specifically with single transferrable vote and how the order the ballots are counted in can change the outcome) and went looking for even better options.

I'm that person mentioning AV and STAR whenever i see people talking about RCV. I always get scolded for making the perfect be the enemy of the good enough, but most places haven't even started to reform voting, so I see this as making sure people know there are options and how they work. With their goals being to weaken the duopoly, I really think people need to know that RCV by itself isn't guaranteed to do that.

[DunYappin]

Came into this video extremely skeptical because I ambiently believed RCV to be a panacea as compared with first pass the post vote . it was nice to learn more about this topic.

[tobeytransport]

I support STV for our parliamentary elections here in Britain, so I’m here to learn.

We currently use First Past the Post and here in my constituency my winning MP has the support of less than 40% of the voters because we have a multi party system but with a voting system that only works for two parties.

[captsorghum]

If Ranked Musical Chairs Voting can guarantee a majority winner by eliminating all but two candidates, why not continue the eliminations for one more round and guarantee a unanimous winner? /s

[jonfklein]

The bottom line is that ranked-choice voting is better than plurality voting by long shot. It might not be perfect but it's a step in the right direction.

[Xob_Driesestig]

Yes, Ranked Choice Voting is susceptible to strategic voting, but so are approval voting and STAR voting. The only voting system that doesn't is the random ballot (mathematically proven). But people don't even want to consider voting systems with an element of randomness in them. Why? Non-deterministic voting systems are more proportional over time and give voters stronger reasons to engage with the democratic process and go out to vote (see the paper "Should we vote in non-deterministic elections"). If we got over our aversion of randomness we could design some incredible voting systems.

[brettbrockschmidt]

I'd like to see weighted average voting, where you rank all the candidates, and each candidate gets the inverse number of points of the number you ranked. For example, if there are 5 candidates, your #1 choice gets 5 points, #2 gets 4 points, & on down the line. The problem is, if a voter only ranks 1 (or 2), candidates and that 1 (or 2) candidate(s) don't rank in the top 1 (or 2), the voter has ceded the opportunity to make a difference. I did the math for Alaska's election, using your rankings chart, and weighted averages would have resulted in: Begich 34.62%, Peltola 34.62%, and Palin 30.78%. HAD the Republicans who didn't choose a 2nd choice, and ASSUMING they'd have chosen Republican, the results would've been: Peltola 36.12%, Palin 33.59%, and Begich 30.28%; results more in line with Alaska's current political climate. The results do prove my point, that being lazy & only picking one candidate, will likely NOT be in one's best interests. It also almost assures that a split ticket will favor the other party, even when the split is within a district where dominant party usually has an overwhelming advantage.

I crunched the numbers, and, had Republicans who only voted for one Republican chosen the other Republican as a second choice, AND they hadn't thrown out Palin's 2nd choices, Peltola would have won (albeit by a very slim margin) making RCV still a bad way of reflecting Alaska's electorate. RCV also requires more calculations/programming than WAV.

The STAR approach still favors partisanship far too much. We need a system that pushes all candidates towards more moderate, popular with the ENTIRE electorate's positions.


We still have the gerrymandering problem to solve, as well. Now that the USPS has zip+4, perhaps districts could have nice rectangular borders using linear zip+4? Just throwing it out there.

[alananimus]

RCV is superior to First Past. That said Proportional Representation is by far the best.

A fundamental problem (and one I don't see you addressing) is what the role of candidates and parties are is fundamentally misunderstood. No one should ever ever ever vote for a candidate. Because people don't understand this democracy is undermined.

A party is supposed to agree on values. Once they agree on values (ideally liberal values) they establish policies based on those values. Then candidates act as brand ambassadors for the product.

It's that simple.

[TheFireGiver]

Other forms of voting are objectively superior to RCV. It doesn't matter. Rcv has been tested in the courts and has a movement behind it. Other methods haven't been tested and no one but political weirdos like us know what they are.

The fatal flaw of political reformers in the USA is that we overthink everything. We look for the perfect solution and refuse to accept anything but that. Let's get RCV first and then we can work on implementing even better methods afterwards.

[jordantyler]

I am totally open to the ideas of better voting systems, and I think tweaks to RCV are warranted. But I am not convinced by this example (the apples and oranges one). This scenario depicts a situation reminiscent of some level of political opposition between red and orange, and a candidate that is somewhere between them in the green option. Since the fewest first round votes went to the green candidate, they were eliminated. This, in my interpretation, indicates that a majority of people are avoiding the compromise candidate, and instead preferring one of the two oppositional candidates. At this point, round two comes down to how the green voters put down their second choices, which 2/3 just did not vote in the second round. Now avoiding the talk of how FPP run-offs work, where turnout is significantly lower. But it could genuinely be the case that the green voters are much closer to the orange candidate and are more likely to vote for him, I wouldn't make that claim off of one vote, but scaled up, I don't know if its correct to say that green should have won over orange. A system that would give this to green could be a system that always favors the compromise option, favors the most middle in any system, even if the majority of people are far away from that middle. There are many ways to spin this outcome that could point to multiple different narratives, and the lack of second round votes is problematic, but the idea that green should have won here is not necessarily an unbiased one, and the bias of round-robin towards choosing the center-most candidate could manifest as a systemic bias towards a given party or ideology, that may not be justified by the democratic will. Everyone votes for green over their opponent, doesn't mean green is popular.

[LddStyx]

Good breakdown, but shouldn't this debate take place between and among the vote reformers who then pick the best method and then focus all of their combined efforts on that one method to actually achieve any results.

[finalcut]

Direct democracy is the only just democracy

[thrashes]

"Educated and engaged electorate" Now theres an oxymoron if i've ever heard one.

[asmeroe]

My state just decided to make RGV against the state constitution along with only allowing legal citizens to vote in the same amendment, ya know something you can only do if you are a citizen.

[איתןשי]

Why the hell is Proportional Representation not even mentioned at all?

[jamestrimbath]

What if we did a ranked order voting system that gave a certain number of points based off of what rank the citizen rated their preferred candidate? Like all the first place picks would get say 3 points and second place would get 2 and third place would get one.

[diggermeddler]

Primaried out Lisa Murkowski is one of the most powerful people in the fn country thanks to this, such a joke.

[johnkeller]

So do you like just have to pretend citizens United never happened or what?