I think the bigger shame would be to spend so much effort promoting RCV, only to have people become jaded and disillusioned with voting method reform in general when they realize RCVs many glaring problems.
The biggest problem with RCV IMO is that it looks like it eliminates the spoiler effect, but it really only eliminates it in simple cases where the third-party candidates are not competitive. This suddenly becomes very obvious and painful in cases like Burlington, 2009 or Alaska, 2022 where voters were told "RCV is great because you can vote honestly", only to realize post-election that this was entirely false, and that they threw away their votes and let the election go to a candidate they despise.
Trust is extremely important in political movements, and very easy to lose. I fear RCV is going to poison the well for any FPTP alternatives for a long time to come.
From https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/what-democrats-win-in-a...
> 40 percent of voters had chosen Peltola as their first choice, 31 percent had chosen Palin and 29 percent had chosen Republican businessman Nick Begich III. Under the rules of ranked choice voting, Begich — as the candidate with the fewest first-choice votes — was then eliminated, and his votes were redistributed to whomever his voters ranked second.
> Unsurprisingly, most of Begich’s votes (50 percent) went to his fellow Republican, Palin. But an impressive 29 percent went to Peltola, and 21 percent were “exhausted,” meaning there was no second-choice pick, and the votes were essentially thrown out. That combination was enough for Peltola to win. While Palin gained more votes from the redistribution than Peltola did, Peltola was starting from a higher total, and receiving 29 percent of Begich’s votes was enough to keep her ahead of Palin. In the end, Peltola received 51 percent of the votes counted in the final round, while Palin received 49 percent.
Sounds fair to me. Some of Begich’s voters expressed a “Begich or nobody” preference. Many Begich voters expressed a “Peltola over Palin” preference. It’s not clear to me why pairwise preferences are meaningful, they don’t encode nuances like the above.
The objection about the spoiler effect is confusing to me. I see that there are certain situations where ex post, you get some weird outcomes where _hypothetically_ ranking your preferred candidate lower would have helped your candidate. But I don't think it's possible to identify these cases ex ante, and I don't see how they can in practice affect anyone's voting strategy. (Though maybe it's enough to get bad press like https://electionscience.org/commentary-analysis/rcv-fools-pa...?)
I think you can spin these technical narratives like "you threw your votes away because, if there had been a head-to-head it would have gone differently". But taking a simple explanation of what happened like the above, it's hard for me to see why the result is actively unfair.
Now don't get me wrong, as a Democrat there is a part of me that is happy Peltola won, but this was clearly a pretty messed up outcome given that Begich was the condorcet winner and that Alaska is a very red state. Republicans are right to be upset about the way this election played out.
Now obviously FPTP also has the possibility of spoiler candidates, but at least in that case it's pretty easy to understand the situations in which you might be throwing away your vote. Do you think most of those Palin voters had any idea that they could have elected Begich by voting strategically? Complex, opaque voting systems like this are super bad for democracy IMO.
When Begich came out as the loser, every one of the votes he got went to the voter's #2 choice which was either Palin or Peltola (and a surprising 29% of Begich voters had Peltola as their #2 choice!)
The only people who "threw away their say in the outcome" are the ones who didn't rank their preferences. They basically opted out of having a vote if their one chosen candidate didn't win by not making a #2 choice.
It's very clear with ranked choice voting when you might be throwing away your vote, it happens only when you don't specify who your vote should go to if your first pick doesn't have enough supporters. Every single person who selected a #1 and #2 choice had a say in the outcome of that election.
It seems possible that Palin lost due to voters incorrectly expressing their preferences by not putting a 2nd choice. If that is a routine thing, then it is indeed a problem with ranked choice voting in the real world, but it is NOT a structural flaw as you are claiming.
In a primary system, Begich doesn't even get to the general. So it becomes Palin against Peltola.
Begich can only win in a head to head matchup in a general election against any single candidate. He cannot beat the field, because he is consistently someone's second choice in the overall field.
With a cardinal ballot such as score or STAR, your argument could potentially hold water because we can glean the nuanced preferences from people's ballots. eg if someone ranked Palin 5, Begich 4, and Peltota 0, that's a very different story from Palin 5, Begich 1, Peltota 0, even though both of those ballots would look identical if they were squished into a ranked ballot format. The second case would support your argument pretty solidly since the voter didn't like Begich much at all, just a smidgen better than Peltota.
For the opposite scenario, consider if this race had been done with a 5 point score/STAR ballot where 40% voters give Palin 5, Begich 4, and Peltota 0, 40% voters give Peltota 5, Begich 4, and Palin 0, and 20% voters give Begich 5. It would be inexcusable not to elect Begich. Even though Begich was not the first choice for 80% of the population, an election like that would indicate such extremely strong support for him that you'll probably be inclined to point out that such an election would never happen in reality and I'm giving a contrived example. Which you're right, I'm not saying this is a likely scenario, I'm simply trying to illustrate how a compromise candidate could in fact be very strong, but RCV will still eliminate them if they don't have enough first choice votes. Placing a premium on people's first choice votes as RCV does is both unwarranted given the data represented on the ballots as well as harmful due to the issues it causes with monotonicity, not electing the Condorcet winner, etc.
If we want to insist on ranked ballots, we should be using a Condorcet method to count them.
It's not even that strong -- it's outcomes where ranking your second-most preferred candidate above your preferred one will help get that second-most preferred candidate elected, as opposed to a third one you detest -- if you know your most preferred candidate won't be elected.
Which makes sense, of course. But it's also "cheating" to manipulate the system if those aren't your actual preferences, and it wouldn't even work in practice because you'd have to know how everyone voted in the first place to know if it was worth it.
You're right, it seems fair to me too in this instance.
The opposite strategy would be like if Trump supporters voted for Warren to advance the weaker candidate against their guy.
The same strategy works in any kind of runoff method including instant runoff voting.
It sounds like the real problem here is education, which will be a challenge with any different voting system, and some a lot more so.
It will probably be better the next time around.
https://news.yahoo.com/sarah-palin-instructed-supporters-not...
Apparently some were instructed not to make a second choice.
But all the voting methods have glaring problems, and every method is going to result in people complaining after their preferred candidate loses but would have won using another method.
RCV isn't going to poison the well any more than other systems. STAR voting and approval voting, for example, open themselves up to the criticism that voting itself becomes a subjective process, which could "poison the well" even more. When people have to worry about what it means to give a 3 vs a 4 to a candidate, or whether to approve 1 or 2 or 3 people?
Ranking candidates is an objectively accurate statement of preference (in contrast to STAR/approval which are subjective), and while instant runoff isn't perfect, it's easy to understand and doesn't result in absurd outcomes or people not understanding how to vote.
You can criticize RCV for sure, but if you want to defend another method, you have to show how its drawbacks aren't even worse.
I mean, I realize this is somewhat subjective, but "more people ranking a candidate first can cause them to lose" seems like a pretty absurd outcome to me.
I'm not saying approval voting is perfect either, sure it has flaws, but at least it doesn't violate the monotonicity criterion (or a variety of other important criteria that RCV fails to satisfy).
If approval voting reduces to bullet voting in heated contests, I don't see that as very bad: to put it crudely, it's just the cost of doing business with that particular voting method, but there's nothing to say the results are compromised as a result. What would be way, way more troubling for the general public is being able to say "but that candidate was the clear favorite, why did the runner-up get the seat?" after the votes are counted. RCV has real, provable problems that will (and have!) create social unrest and a skepticism of the election's results when something like the monotonicity criterion is violated, not to mention the spoiler effect is not completely eliminated under RCV.
Further I believe bounded rationality can be applied here and very many people would still take the approach of filling in more than one bubble even in "strategic" settings, because people aren't perfect rational utility-maximizing agents, and anyway I don't see an acute disadvantage of using approval voting if that's the biggest gripe people seem to have about it.
In short: think of elections in a more 21st-century-Nobel-winner sense, not in a rote 20th-century-econ-professor sense.
From a voter perspective, monotonicity and favorite betrayer seem to be two of the most important factors when determining "absurd outcomes." At least in my opinion.
It sure does seem absurd, and so thankfully there's no case where RCV does that! :)
There seems to be a lot of misinformation thrown around about this, where people seem to be conflating different issues.
I'm not sure what your source is, but you might be misunderstanding the Favorite Betrayal Criterion... which seems counterintuitive at first but isn't really. There's a lot of noise made about the fact that moving a non-preferred candidate higher than your preferred candidate can help your preferred candidate to win... but it's actually because you're ranking your preferred candidate's main opponent even lower in the process. And also it's basically impossible to do strategically because you'd need to know how everybody else voted first.
End of story, there's nothing absurd about cadidate A winning, but if some people downranked candidate A from 2nd to 3rd rank, then that candidate would lose.
Score voting methods like star voting and approval voting are objectively superior.
I’d love to see an actual paper of the methodology of VSE (the FAQ is less complete than I would like, but helpful in that it shows lots of problems – for instance, while the brief description claims VSE tests elections with “voters who cluster on issues in a realistic way”, none of the descriptions of the different voter models mentions any tie to any empirical research on how voters actually cluster, instead it simply models three different, apparently chosen because of intuitive/aesthetic appeal, empirically ungrounded, abstract ideals); there are several dimensions of it which seems quite subjective/arbitrary rather than objective, making its conclusions also arbitrary, and, worse, it seems to simply ignore known effects like cultural differences in applying rating systems without concrete grounding (which effects both score-based and limited-ranks systems, but not particularly forced-preference or vote-for-one systems.)
Which, cynically, might be the reason it has achieved the level of adoption that it has so far. We at least have to consider the possibility that the current major parties will only (disingenuously) support reforms that will, in the long run, further entrench their duopoly.
Any fight against RCV is purely a republican fight against more equitable and realistic representation for americans. It's not hard to understand, as plenty of schoolkids use RCV every year for school and mock elections. It is strictly better than plurality voting in terms of getting more people elected that more people are at least a little happy with. It by and large results in a more represented public.
If, by some magic, we end up in a world where politics is a utopia and the extremely contrived "issues" with RCV finally are worth caring about, THEN we can move to replace it, which will be easier in an environment that allows more nuance to politics, like RCV does.
For now, RCV is an easy way to get a broadly better political system. It is currently only disliked by like 1000 turbonerds who spend their time making absurdly complicated voting systems to solve ever more contrived voting situations, situations that broadly aren't the problems currently facing the world, and every other opponent is a republican who either believes incorrect partisan rhetoric ("it's more than one vote!") or cynically understands how it will cause them to lose elections and for some reason think that's a bad thing.
Oh, republicans are already attacking it because of Alaska
https://washingtonmonthly.com/2022/09/06/sarah-palin-and-the...
