2018 Libertarian gubernatorial candidate Chris Powell in the Daily Oklahoman by way of Ballot Access News (excerpt):
As separate elections, runoffs are an additional cost to the taxpayer. With different and usually much lower turnout, they often produce a result that doesn’t reflect the will of the primary voters. A process that would combine the runoff with the primary, save taxpayer dollars, be more convenient for voters and eliminate the effects of lower turnout would be an obvious improvement. Fortunately, such a process exists.
Ranked-choice voting allows a voter to mark a ballot for not just their first choice but also a second and third, continuing to rank all the candidates of whom they approve until the list is exhausted. Also called instant-runoff voting, this method is used in numerous countries around the world, several cities across the United States, and for state and federal elections in Maine. If no candidate achieves a majority after the first choice votes are counted, the candidate with the fewest votes is eliminated and those ballots have the second choice votes counted and added to the total. This process is continued until there is a candidate who does have a majority and becomes the winner.
Ranked-choice voting has other benefits in addition to saving time and money and preserving the will of the voters. Candidates will be discouraged from negative campaigning and potentially losing the chance to be a second or third choice. Voters won’t have to worry about “wasting” their vote out of fear that their most preferred candidate might not be able to get enough support to win. And whomever is elected is guaranteed to have received majority support.
Curious what happened at those LP conventions.
You would get one candidate eliminated first in one precinct and another eliminated first in another precinct, votes reallocated here to a candidate that’s been eliminated there, and so on. It cannot be made to work that way. Such it is for methods that are “non-additive” in the terms of the branch of applied mathematics called social choice theory.
I used to like approval voting until I saw it implemented at LP conventions. It’s been a clusterfuck in practice from what I have seen.
Why? I see no reason why in principle the eliminations and reallocations can’t be done precinct by precinct and then added up across precincts. That may not be the way it’s done now but why could that not be done in theory?
Paulie. All the votes must be totaled before the process of rounds of elimination and reallocation can begin.
Fernando. If voters are allowed to vote for all of the ones they want for a given seat, as I suggested above (the name for that method is “Approval Voting”), there is no spoiler whatsoever. You can vote for both your Green and your Democrat, no problem.
I see no reason ranked choice can’t be tallied precinct by precinct. That would just be a slightly different way to write the law.
But the problem with that is Third Party voter gets blamed for a major party loss, ranked choice voting removes this issue by allowing you to rank your top 3 choices for office, so while the Green Party Candidate may have been your first choice, you can pick the Democrats as your 2nd or 3rd choice your vote gets to them eventually, so you can’t say that the Greens took votes away from the Democrats.
In brief, the single biggest problem with it is it’s non-additive. No vote counting can be done at the various polling places/districts/precincts what have you. The votes must all be gathered to one place first to begin the count. In other words, it necessitates full centralization. From there the whole big process of rounds of elimination and reallocation is to be done. Predictably, this incentivizes usage of voting machines. All of this together leads you to an elaborate expensive vote that’s easy to rig and hard to keep fair. There’s more wrong with it, but these are the biggest of its problems.
The easiest way to eliminate the spoiler you speak of is to just hold the vote like usual, except only just allowing the voters to vote for all the ones they want for a given seat instead of stipulating that they vote for only one of the ones they want. That would work fine.
Why? Ranked choice voting eliminates the spoiler argument from the Third Party argument altogether.
It saddens me to see a Libertarian speak in favor of this atrocious voting method.
Good article. I heard there’s a big national push for ranked choice in the works.