Video explainer on how the conservative minority punks Democrats and Republican moderates

It is interesting to watch this video playing out in real time as the Republicans begin with “Don’t you dare do exactly what we did or we will call you obstructionists!” And a number of dems buy it. Would be funny if not so sad.

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yeah, I’m not going to hold ranked choice voting up against some mathematical standard of perfection, holding it up against the existing first-past-the-post winner-take-all system does just fine

y’know, like all politics

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Which ranked voting system are we talking about? With the system where you give a vote to everyone you want to win, then ultimately your vote will be applied to the candidate who can win in a head to head (unless you voted for the runner up). As they remove the “losers” as the votes are tallied. IIRC Australia uses this.

Ultimately this should allow for more moderate or at least a larger variety of parties. First past the post means ONLY a two party system is sustainable. And those two parties generally will start to skew more extreme as time goes on. And thus we are trapped in the “lesser of two evils” conundrum.

I don’t understand what the 2nd issue has to do with anything. Ones opinion counts at the time of the vote. Why should it matter if it changes over time?

My understanding is that when “Ranked Choice Voting” is described unqualified, it’s meant to refer to instant runoff.

As for the issues, they’re used to describe models of ideals in social choice theory. It’s true that the election only happens once. But think about it this way: imagine two alternate universes where, all things being equal, one voting bloc esteems candidate A higher than candidate B. In the other alternate universe, everything else is the same but the identified bloc esteems candidate B higher than candidate A. In IRV, candidate B could be the winner in the first universe but the loser in the 2nd universe. In general, monotonicity is the desire that being better positioned with respect to a given subset of the community (all else held equal) should better position you in the full social accounting. IRV violates this.

The point is that every voting system has a critical flaw. Choose your flaw carefully.

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