<story><title>What is ranked-choice voting and why is New York using it?</title><url>https://www.npr.org/2021/06/22/1008807504/ranked-choice-voting-new-york-city-mayors-race</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>elihu</author><text>This isn&amp;#x27;t very good reporting by NPR.  The downsides they list are just straw men easily dismissed by RCV proponents, and they give an appearance of fair-and-balanced coverage while making opponents of RCV sound like Luddites.  (It also seems like they got all their information from, say, chatting with people from FairVote and not by actually reading online discussions like this one here.)&lt;p&gt;RCV does have some serious problems.  Eliminating the candidate with the least first-place votes at each round means a high probability of rejecting compromise candidates that may be a lot of voters&amp;#x27; second choice.  Also, placing your first-choice candidate first isn&amp;#x27;t always a safe choice.  RCV is non-monotonic, which means it&amp;#x27;s possible that ranking someone first might actually cause them to lose.  That&amp;#x27;s weird, and I think it&amp;#x27;s a good enough reason to investigate other options.&lt;p&gt;I think we should use approval voting in single-winner state and national elections.  It&amp;#x27;s simple and it solves the problem of 3rd party candidates being spoilers (which is why most voting reform advocates dislike FPTP in the first place) without introducing any new problems.  STAR is also a pretty good system.&lt;p&gt;Approval voting is currently used in Fargo ND and they recently adopted it in St. Louis as well.&lt;p&gt;There&amp;#x27;s a lot at stake when we change our election systems.  I think one of the biggest risks is that we adopt RCV widely and then when people figure out that it&amp;#x27;s not actually all that great, they aren&amp;#x27;t going to want to try something different.  They&amp;#x27;ll either say &amp;quot;democracy just doesn&amp;#x27;t work very well and there&amp;#x27;s nothing we can do about it&amp;quot;, or they&amp;#x27;ll go back to FPTP because they were misled by a successful PR campaign that sounds like it has the backing of voting system experts.  Voting systems should be changed rarely, and when it happens we should use the best available system, not chase the latest fad.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>sjfidsfkds</author><text>If I approve of two candidates, but I like one more than the other, approval voting doesn’t seem to allow me to express that preference. Do I vote for both candidates, or only the one I like the most? As a naive voter who isn’t going to research that question, will I make the right choice?</text></comment>
<story><title>What is ranked-choice voting and why is New York using it?</title><url>https://www.npr.org/2021/06/22/1008807504/ranked-choice-voting-new-york-city-mayors-race</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>elihu</author><text>This isn&amp;#x27;t very good reporting by NPR.  The downsides they list are just straw men easily dismissed by RCV proponents, and they give an appearance of fair-and-balanced coverage while making opponents of RCV sound like Luddites.  (It also seems like they got all their information from, say, chatting with people from FairVote and not by actually reading online discussions like this one here.)&lt;p&gt;RCV does have some serious problems.  Eliminating the candidate with the least first-place votes at each round means a high probability of rejecting compromise candidates that may be a lot of voters&amp;#x27; second choice.  Also, placing your first-choice candidate first isn&amp;#x27;t always a safe choice.  RCV is non-monotonic, which means it&amp;#x27;s possible that ranking someone first might actually cause them to lose.  That&amp;#x27;s weird, and I think it&amp;#x27;s a good enough reason to investigate other options.&lt;p&gt;I think we should use approval voting in single-winner state and national elections.  It&amp;#x27;s simple and it solves the problem of 3rd party candidates being spoilers (which is why most voting reform advocates dislike FPTP in the first place) without introducing any new problems.  STAR is also a pretty good system.&lt;p&gt;Approval voting is currently used in Fargo ND and they recently adopted it in St. Louis as well.&lt;p&gt;There&amp;#x27;s a lot at stake when we change our election systems.  I think one of the biggest risks is that we adopt RCV widely and then when people figure out that it&amp;#x27;s not actually all that great, they aren&amp;#x27;t going to want to try something different.  They&amp;#x27;ll either say &amp;quot;democracy just doesn&amp;#x27;t work very well and there&amp;#x27;s nothing we can do about it&amp;quot;, or they&amp;#x27;ll go back to FPTP because they were misled by a successful PR campaign that sounds like it has the backing of voting system experts.  Voting systems should be changed rarely, and when it happens we should use the best available system, not chase the latest fad.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>aplummer</author><text>&amp;gt; RCV does have some serious problems. Eliminating the candidate with the least first-place votes at each round means a high probability of rejecting compromise candidates that may be a lot of voters&amp;#x27; second choice. Also, placing your first-choice candidate first isn&amp;#x27;t always a safe choice. RCV is non-monotonic, which means it&amp;#x27;s possible that ranking someone first might actually cause them to lose. That&amp;#x27;s weird, and I think it&amp;#x27;s a good enough reason to investigate other options.&lt;p&gt;This is actually not true and the opposite of what happens. With RCV, people feel comfortable putting compromise or 3rd party candidates first because they know they aren&amp;#x27;t throwing away a vote. It creates a system where there is more middle ground and less black and white 2 party systems.</text></comment>