Condorcet methods like Ranked Pairs select whoever would 1v1 all the other candidates. You can put as many names as you like in whatever order you like. Having no preference between any two people is valid. Everyone’s ranking is used to simulate every possible runoff. There is no “it shoulda been [blank]!” factor, because basically, it was. If someone could have won - they do.
“Ranked Choice” is a specific system, which sucks. It’s not for single-winner elections. It picks the first guy who can scrounge together a simple majority. For parliaments, it lets an area elect a bunch of people by seeing who’s first to attain 1/6th of voters, then 1/5th of who’s left, 1/4th, etc. This is a great way to do proportional representation and destroy gerrymandering. But it’s fundamentally not looking for the best candidate, so it could easily elect Candidate B when a supermajority of voters ranked A > B.
… also Approval Voting is the same ballots we use now, but you check as many names as you want. Most votes wins. It is genuinely that simple, and it somehow gets the same results as ranked Condorcet, and there’s no reason we’re not doing it by default.
Good excuse to talk about ranked ballots.
Condorcet methods like Ranked Pairs select whoever would 1v1 all the other candidates. You can put as many names as you like in whatever order you like. Having no preference between any two people is valid. Everyone’s ranking is used to simulate every possible runoff. There is no “it shoulda been [blank]!” factor, because basically, it was. If someone could have won - they do.
“Ranked Choice” is a specific system, which sucks. It’s not for single-winner elections. It picks the first guy who can scrounge together a simple majority. For parliaments, it lets an area elect a bunch of people by seeing who’s first to attain 1/6th of voters, then 1/5th of who’s left, 1/4th, etc. This is a great way to do proportional representation and destroy gerrymandering. But it’s fundamentally not looking for the best candidate, so it could easily elect Candidate B when a supermajority of voters ranked A > B.
… also Approval Voting is the same ballots we use now, but you check as many names as you want. Most votes wins. It is genuinely that simple, and it somehow gets the same results as ranked Condorcet, and there’s no reason we’re not doing it by default.