Posted on 08/22/2009 8:14:55 PM PDT by fiscon1
A couple weeks ago, I did a story on a referendum in the Tacoma area on Ranked Choice Voting. In RCV, a voter ranks the candidates in the order of their preference. Then, if one candidate gets 50.1% or more they win. If not, the bottom candidate is dropped off and the second choice of everyone that chose that candidate first gets their votes. This process continues until someone finally does get to fifty percent or more. This is a way to encourage more third party participation.
(Excerpt) Read more at theeprovocateur.blogspot.com ...
I tried ranked voting, for a non-political end. The goal was to select a slogan. With ranked voting, the lousy slogan won consistently, but nobody liked it. When we tried a straight up-down vote, everyone liked the slogan and it went on to be a success.
Beware alternate voting schemes! You may not like the result, but the person pushing the scheme probably will.
If someone is promoting a statistical, ranked, stepped or other alternative method, the candidate or choice has little chance of winning a straight vote. Think Alinsky, Delphi, scam when you are approached with this.
Sure it gives “alternative” choices a better chance, but do we want fringe results?
True, which is why the Democratic and Republican parties will never let it happen. It would also save the costs of primary elections, since all candidates could just be put on the general election ballots.
It probably would make sense if first choice votes were worth more than second and so forth.
Say you have ten candidates:
The first choice is worth 10 points, second 9, third 8: and so forth if you want to do it in a linear manner.
That contradicts my own experience. I suspect you have mischaracterized your own experience. Do you have a close connection to one of the major political parties?
This might require counting a 100 million votes dozens of times. With today's computers, a PC could do this in a few minutes.
Nope, no “close connections”.
We simply tried different voting methods as a means to arrive at a choice for a slogan for a project. Most people were unhappy with the results of the “alternative methods”. The methods we tried tended to select the one we disliked least, rather than the one we all liked most. We spent some time looking at different selection (voting) methods over a week, maybe two.
People push “alternative methods” when their choice can’t win a straight vote, else why push for the alternative? I ran across this when we were trying to site an alternative energy project. After we had picked a place (a co-generation plant) people came out of the woodwork with “alternative voting methods” because they didn’t like the final choice. They wanted a re-vote using various other techniques that they clearly felt would result in placing the project somewhere else than what we’d picked (or why complain about the method we used?).
Beware alternate voting schemes! You may not like the result, but the person pushing the scheme probably will.
It would be too bad if people dismissed range voting simply because some poster didn't read the article and was part of a group that used ranked voting.
Well we just elected the most left-wing senator to the position of president of the USA.
That doesn't count as a fringe result?
We looked at a variety of methods, once we got started.
You are right, maybe Ralph Nader or open-border libertarians would have been better.
Or the Democratic Socialist Party.
The election of Obama was not due to how we vote, it was how candidates are selected, and who selects them.
Why not set up an alternative voting scenario here on FR and see who gets elected? Take all the primary contenders, pick a method, and use the method to have freepers vote.
While I can’t say I have a thorough understanding of how this tends to play out my first reaction is that it will save sigificant money spent on runoff elections.
That’s not true. In range voting everyone’s score is independent of everyone else. You can vote the same for everyone. You can give everyone a ten.
RCV voting does in fact yield suboptimum results, while it LOOKS like it would give you the best results.
There are two problems with RCV. The first is the “kook vote” problem. If you have a system with RCV, you get crazy people running for office, and they have a dedicated following of crazy voters who will come out. But having come out, they WILL tend to make 2nd and 3rd choices, and those choices will also be the craziest choices.
These are voters who wouldn’t bother to come out just to pick from two or three major candidates, but their combined effect can pick the least useful candidate.
The 2nd problem is more of a statistical one, which is that while we can rank people 1,2,3, those rankings don’t give us absolute valuations, just relative ones.
I might really love one candidate, and then struggle to choose between number 2 and number 3; if I was ranking using a 100-point total, I might say my candidates were 95,3, and 2.
But maybe lots of people find that two candidates are about the same, and the 3rd is useless. They might do 50-49-1.
Well, if I was one of those 50-49-1 people, and it turned out that my “1” was going to win because of other votes, I could easily be swayed to change from my 50 to my 49 in order to get my 49 elected instead of the ‘1’.
But in a simple ranking system, my 49 might get eliminated first, and then my 50.
This suggests a better solution is to provide a numeric value like “100”, and allow people to assign numbers to candidates.
But it turns out that one of the best ways to handle this is to have a 2nd full vote if nobody gets the 50% on the 1st ballot, and only then would you start eliminating the worst performer, but have ANOTHER vote after each is eliminated.
This allows people to change their vote to maximise the chance that a candidate they can tolerate ends up winning.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.