Rank Choice Voting and Federal Funding of Elections

[dallasarch_djn (Dominic Norris)]

Make Rank Choice Voting the law of the Land. Prohibit Political Action Committees and move to federally funded campaigns. We have to get big money out of campaigns and elections to ensure that politicians know who they work for: The People! This is the first step to ending the corporate control of government.

[MKSJ]

I’m pretty sure that Alaska just voted to get rid of the Ranked Choice Voting system they previously had because of how much they hated their experience with Ranked Choice Voting.

So how about “No”.

[nadreggid (D Kelly)]

This is the best way to restore voting power to the people.

[nadreggid (D Kelly)]

Alaska kept their Rank Choice voting for now, and when more people understand how it works, it will just get more popular. It is easy for people who want to control the system to bitch about it and they get the coverage because mainstream media backs the good old boyz.

[MKSJ]

@nadreggid

Alaska kept their Rank Choice voting for now

In an vote that was suspicious at best and quite probably was stolen.

[tylerammon (Tyler McGettigan)]

@nadreggid

when more people understand how it works, it will just get more popular.

When people first learn other voting methods exist, it is usually first by RCV activists. However, if they start taking a serious look into other systems, they’ll usually abandon RCV.

The basic idea is that RCV doesn’t follow through on all the promises made about it. Instead of overcoming the two-party system, it perpetuates it. It presents the individual voter with a freer ballot, then counts it in a stupid way that still restricts the voter.

I could go on, but I’ve already written plenty elsewhere:

Rank Choice Voting for Congressional Elections

There are a lot of promises made about RCV, but there are many reasons to think it (a) does next to nothing to improve representation in government, and (b) the drawbacks outweigh any nominal gain in accuracy. I’d start with the fact that even FairVote recognizes RCV elections agree with our current system at least 93% of the time. I say “at least” because strategic voting in our current system has similarities with the instant runoff model: Whether it is the voter or the IRV system, support fo…

Rank Choice Voting for Congressional Elections

I’d appreciate if RCV advocates stopped promoting the instant runoff model, and went with a Condorcet model like Ranked Robin. The most egregious failures of RCV are from the way it counts ballots, leading to inefficiencies in administration, and mistrust in the results, which can seem chaotic. Ranked Robin is both simpler to administer, and more intuitive: People are already used to the idea of a sports tournament (i.e. a “Round Robin”), where teams play against each other, and the team who wi…

Rank Choice Voting for Congressional Elections

Except RCV doesn’t do that. Voting your heart and conscience can and does backfire. This is exactly what happened to Palin voters in the 2022 Alaska Special Congressional Election. By voting their heart and conscience, they got a worse result than if some of them had just stayed home. This is why Republicans pressured Nancy Dahlstrom to drop out leading up to the current election. More folks putting support behind candidates they truly believe in AND using the 2nd & 3rd preferences to expres…

Ban Rank Choice Voting

No, RCV does not help third parties, and I have the receipts: 1. Australia’s 100-Year Experiment with RCV The most conclusive proof of RCV’s impotence in the face of a two-party system is clear to see in the one country which has used it for the longest. For a little over a century, Australia’s House of Representatives has used single-winner RCV, and their Senate has used a proportional system. I should stress is it is well established that proportional systems do help third parties; and the A…