It has increasingly come to the US public’s attention that the current voting system isn’t providing results that are as good as we can hope for, and groups such as Andrew Yang’s Forward Party have called to adopt ranked choice voting, a family of methods where voters can indicate their order of preferences for multiple candidates, not just their favorite. However, most people, when they hear “Ranked Choice Voting”, have been trained to think of Instant Runoff Voting, which is one of the worst RCV methods known, and arguably even worse than the plurality system that is commonly used in the US (for one, it’s expensive, which means government would have less money to spend on other programs that direly need funding; though I won’t post a conclusive takedown of the method right now; do see this link for some diagrams that really provoked some thought for me).
There is one problem with IRV worth delving into here: oftentimes there will be a candidate who will beat every single other candidate in a head-to-head race. This candidate should obviously win, but IRV will not always elect that candidate, even though ranked ballots provide enough information to identify that candidate.
Likewise, even when there isn’t a single candidate who fits that description, there is usually a group who each can beat any candidate outside that group. This group is called the Top Group (sometimes in technical literature it’s called the Smith Set, and when there is only one candidate in the Top Group, that candidate is called the Condorcet winner). Each candidate in the Top Group has a strong position to argue they deserve to win the election; conversely, a candidate not in the Top Group should never be elected, but IRV and the current system both sometimes will do that.
The easy way to fix this is to say that we will throw away all candidates not in the Top Group before continuing to find the final winner. However, IRV would still be expensive and non-straightforward to count, and the diagrams that I linked above will still be weird. One approach, that I state is better than either the familiar FPTP or IRV systems, is to use the ranked ballots to identify each voter’s favorite candidate from the Top Group, and elect the candidate in the Top Group with the most first preferences. This will be quicker and cheaper than doing a full IRV count, and will give more predictable results than IRV, and will give much better results than the current system.
That is only one approach to holding an election which ensures the winner is always in the Top Group; I do think it’s an improvement over both IRV and the current system that’s easy to explain, but there are still better Ranked Choice methods that always elect candidates from the Top Group.
It has increasingly come to the US public’s attention that the current voting system isn’t providing results that are as good as we can hope for, and groups such as Andrew Yang’s Forward Party have called to adopt ranked choice voting, a family of methods where voters can indicate their order of preferences for multiple candidates, not just their favorite. However, most people, when they hear “Ranked Choice Voting”, have been trained to think of Instant Runoff Voting, which is one of the worst RCV methods known, and arguably even worse than the plurality system that is commonly used in the US (for one, it’s expensive, which means government would have less money to spend on other programs that direly need funding; though I won’t post a conclusive takedown of the method right now; do see this link for some diagrams that really provoked some thought for me).
There is one problem with IRV worth delving into here: oftentimes there will be a candidate who will beat every single other candidate in a head-to-head race. This candidate should obviously win, but IRV will not always elect that candidate, even though ranked ballots provide enough information to identify that candidate.
Likewise, even when there isn’t a single candidate who fits that description, there is usually a group who each can beat any candidate outside that group. This group is called the Top Group (sometimes in technical literature it’s called the Smith Set, and when there is only one candidate in the Top Group, that candidate is called the Condorcet winner). Each candidate in the Top Group has a strong position to argue they deserve to win the election; conversely, a candidate not in the Top Group should never be elected, but IRV and the current system both sometimes will do that.
The easy way to fix this is to say that we will throw away all candidates not in the Top Group before continuing to find the final winner. However, IRV would still be expensive and non-straightforward to count, and the diagrams that I linked above will still be weird. One approach, that I state is better than either the familiar FPTP or IRV systems, is to use the ranked ballots to identify each voter’s favorite candidate from the Top Group, and elect the candidate in the Top Group with the most first preferences. This will be quicker and cheaper than doing a full IRV count, and will give more predictable results than IRV, and will give much better results than the current system.
That is only one approach to holding an election which ensures the winner is always in the Top Group; I do think it’s an improvement over both IRV and the current system that’s easy to explain, but there are still better Ranked Choice methods that always elect candidates from the Top Group.