Ranked Choice Voting (RCV): As Chuck indicates, under RCV your vote won’t count at all if none of your favorites make it into the final runoff. Moreover, in any election in which there are 3 or more viable candidates with a real chance of winning, RCV can NOT prevent vote splitting and thus will subject voters to the dread dilemma of lesser evil voting, same as under our similarly flawed one-choice voting system. In fact, in the 2022 RCV Congressional election in Alaska the majority Republican vote got split between two Republican Party candidates, enabling the sole Democratic Party candidate to win with less than a majority of the total vote — which led more than a dozen sympathetic Republican states to outlaw RCV — which in turn clearly disqualifies RCV as a suitable voting method for our country since it shows that RCV does not and evidently cannot meet the #1 criterion for any voting method: that essentially all the voters have confidence in it. (Fortunately, STAR voting — Score Then Automatic Runoff voting — overcomes all these problems and more that are associated with RCV. Like 5-star product rating, with which all of us are familiar, and unlike any ranking system, STAR enables voters to say how much they like the candidates they choose to rate or score, and thus provides a lot more information for determining the true preference of all the voters.)
Multimember Districts: I see changing our dysfunctional one-choice voting method — for our established singlemember district elections now, and then for any multimember district elections we may create later on — as a lot more important than changing our singlemember districts to multimember districts right away, so I think we should first not adopt ranked choice voting, not adopt multi-member districts right away, then concentrate on advocating and passing STAR voting, and only then reconsider multimember districts.
Yes, we still have to vote for the lesser evil under RCV, but that’s the worst-case scenario. RCV gives voters a way to express who they really want instead of having to choose between “wasting” their vote or gaming the system to vote “strategically”.
The problem with STAR voting is that it doesn’t seem fair to me. The way I’m reading this, someone who votes 5 5 0 0 0 will get more of a vote in the initial count than someone who votes 5 4 3 2 1 at the cost of potentially not being counted in the runoff. This would seem to lead to more “gaming” by parties and less people voting for honestly for the individual they want.
I read through a lot of stuff about the 2022 Alaska election, and it looks like what happened is that enough Begich voters simply wanted Peltola over Palin, and that’s how Pelota won. The way I’m understanding the argument, people wanted Palin voters to count twice. They’re already counting for Palin, so why should they count for Begich too? I wish they could’ve put both voting systems on one ballot and compared the outcomes.
If votes are all online via computer, then the computer can check that votes are valid before being submitted, so we don’t have this problem of people accidentally casting invalid votes.
Something else that might work better if everybody voted on computer might be a hybrid between STAR and RCV: basically, every voter gets 100 points to allocate to the candidates, and they can weigh the candidates however they want, and a computer can make sure that the points all add up to 100. This would solve the problem with some voters getting more of a vote with STAR.
In any case, STAR still seems better than what we have now. I don’t know if it’s better than RCV, but I’d still take STAR over FPTP.
B Lee,
Thanks for responding with your concern about what you see as “the problem with some voters getting more of a vote with STAR”, and specifically that “someone who votes 5 5 0 0 0 [on a STAR ballot] will get more of a vote in the initial count than someone who votes 5 4 3 2 1 [on an RCV ballot]”.
For the sake of clarity in this discussion, how ’bout we start by noting the basic difference between the STAR ballot numbers as cardinal numbers, and the RCV ballot numbers as ordinal numbers, by stating your examples as 5 5 0 0 0 (in STAR) and as 5th 4th 3rd 2nd 1st (in RCV) or maybe better as 1st 2nd 3rd 4th 5th (in RCV)? By doing this we remind ourselves that the cardinal numbers used in STAR are actual, measurable values, as in 0-to-5-star product rating, and that the ordinal numbers used in RCV are only relative values that can be located anywhere on a zero to five scale just so long as 1st is ahead of 2nd, etc. — which means that ranking a candidate 1st doesn’t necessarily mean that you like ’em a lot, just that you like ’em more than the others, and that ranking a candidate 5th doesn’t necessarily mean that you dislike ’em a lot, just that you like ’em less than the others.
Now considering a 5 5 0 0 0 vote on a five-candidate STAR ballot, this could well be a perfectly honest vote, couldn’t it? It would mean that I as the voter think that the first two candidates listed are tops, that I like them equally well, and that I thoroughly dislike or know nothing about the others — and incidentally, this shows that STAR voting offers every voter an equal opportunity, as opposed to “more of a vote”, to score every candidate as they wish.
Nevertheless, what about your concern that a 5 5 0 0 0 STAR ballot will “get more of a vote”? Is it based on your concern that the two 5s might have been overrated strategic votes? If it is, and even if they were, just remember that in STAR elections and in RCV elections, voters are advised to give their top candidates top ratings or rankings, and that in STAR elections but not in RCV elections, voters have the opportunity not to do so, as in this case to score the 5s as, say, 3s or 4s.
Yes, in the ’22 RCV Alaska Congressional primary and general elections Peltola did win just as you said (except for the bizarre argument you mentioned that “people wanted Palin voters to count twice”!), but this begs the original question about what went wrong, which was simply that the Republican vote got split, as would have happened under one-choice voting (FPTP) too, and that Begich, who as the Condorcet or “beats all” winner was clearly the overall choice — that Begich got eliminated solely on the basis of first place votes since they’re all that RCV considers in the runoffs (whereas STAR takes account of all the ballot scores from the get go).
Speaking of hybrid voting methods, STAR voting (Score Then Automatic Runoff voting) actually is as a hybrid of score voting and ranked choice voting (a.k.a. instant runoff voting), and was designed by RCV advocates to overcome the serious problems they came to see in RCV.
Michael