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!
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.
No it’s extremely biased. Including the way in which you presented it so that people only see his critique, and not his positive points.
I also never mentioned Fair Vote. RCV isn’t “their” system either. Are you sure you’re not projecting?
Approval and STAR both still heavily select for the “safest” candidate. In Star it’s because you know they’re going into a two person run off. So it’s basically a primary and a general in one election. That’s not going to give people the confidence to rank third parties highly.
Approval literally requires you to get rid of your safety vote if you want your preferred candidate to win. That’s a leap of faith that’s not happening and no amount of theoretical math is going to catch it.
Mr Beast is repeating what he’s heard and that’s not his fault, except that he should really do more research. There are no recorded cases in the US where RCV has caused the candidate with majority support to lose. And the theoretical underpinning seems to rely solely on acting as if a preferred candidate didn’t exist. The entire moving people up or down thing smacks of game show math magic. (The odds of finding the prize magically increase if you mentally eliminate one of three doors).
I’ve seen people say that the way RCV shakes out can be unfair because of that, but every ballot, poll, or decision people are asked to make is informed by the choices present. In sophomore year politics they teach this with a simple example. A city council pays for a poll to see what to do with an empty lot. It comes back; 20 percent develop commercial; 20 percent homeless shelter; and 60 percent kid’s park. Well they really want commercial development so they give the city the options of commercial development and homeless shelter on the referendum and let NIMBYism handle the rest.
The thing is, even though the example is a bad faith scenario, it happens in good faith situations too. Like with Ross Perot in 1992. The mere presence of someone on the ballot shapes how people vote. For example if Trump wasn’t on the ballot people would be far less likely to vote for Biden. RCV cannot escape this, but neither can any other system of electing people. RCV is in fact meant to counter this problem.
It’s only more expensive the first time you run it and once you are comfortable with it, it can replace primaries. Meaning you actually save money by not having two elections.
And then he repeats the stupid voter line which hasn’t been a problem in the 62 voting jurisdictions RCV is in use in.
TL;DR - skip to my link about RCV producing plurality winners in actual elections. That’s the most important bit.
It’s pretty much the #1 search result for “ranked choice voting” and a big influence for getting people interested. If you read their website, you’ll come away thinking it’s the best system possible, which ignores its faults.
That’s why I mentioned it. I initially avoided posting direct sources hoping people would look it up themselves and find a source they agreed with, and finally posted those two links because they’re the most different from what you’d get as the top search result from FairVote.
Isn’t that what people want? The option most voters are happy with? I’m having trouble seeing how that’s a bad thing.
I don’t follow. RCV is pretty much the same, except your votes only get reallocated if your primary candidate loses, and you lose any votes for candidates that have already been knocked out. If you have two similar candidates, it’s more likely both will be knocked out than one of them move forward, which is precisely what the spoiler effect is.
You can have a primary system with STAR, just make it a multiple winner primary. Since the spoiler effect is pretty much eliminated, there’s no issue having multiple candidates from the same party in the general election. The same goes for Approval.
Ok. There’s also not that many samples.
However, there are surprising results, such as a large number of elections resulting in a plurality winner instead of majority.
I’m pretty sure most people would be surprised at this outcome, since RCV is supposed to fix this sort of thing. That’s incredibly unlikely under STAR or Approval voting.
Feel free to skip, this has nothing to do with it our discussion, I just like the thought experiment.
If you’re referring to the “always switch” logic, that’s sound. Here’s how it would work out depending on which door you pick initially (prize is in door A):
If you always switch, you have a 66% chance of winning (basically you need to not pick the winning door and you’ll win). If you never switch, you’ll have a 33% chance of winning (if you picked the right door the first time). This works because you know the gameshow host won’t open the winning door (need the suspense for viewers), and they want to give the contestant an edge (again, winners attract viewers).
Sure, but other voting systems can produce a majority winner pretty much every time. RCV can produce the same situation that happened with Ross Perot, but probably a but less often than FPTP, especially if you limit realistic candidates to like 3-4. But as soon as you get to crowded ballots (e.g. in a primary), things get messy and RCV can produce surprising results.