Ranked choice voting (RCV) — also known as instant runoff voting (IRV) — makes our elections better by allowing voters to rank candidates in order of preference.
RCV is straightforward: Voters have the option to rank candidates in order of preference: first, second, third and so forth. If your first choice doesn’t have a chance to win, your ballot counts for your next choice.
RCV works in all types of elections and supports more representative outcomes. RCV means better choices, better campaigns, and better representation.
Originally Posted By u/Albany50501 At 2025-04-22 02:51:32 PM | Source
I’m kind of shocked Ranked choice wasn’t the first thing thought of and implemented tbh
The GOP is making RCV and other voting methods illegal where they can. See Florida & Tennessee.
Better hurry up & vote them out if you want to get rid of FpTP.
I’d prefer Approval, but yes, FPTP needs to end.
US needs MAJOR electoral reforms.
Yes.
The biggest problem in American politics is we only have two parties who can win that don’t represent the true majority but the most vocal minorities, the rich and the bean counters.
After this last election I’m starting to hate the Dems as much as reps. Yes they’re better on a mathematical level but most of them don’t listen when the people don’t want what the party wants and are too weak and unlikable to stand up for democracy when faced with a charismatic tyrant.
For single seat elections: Ranked Choice is good, Approval Voting is better, but anything is better than First Past The Post. So I’ll happily accept RCV, especially as it opens up the door inches our way inti to better voting systems.
For multi-seat elections, proportional voting should be used.
Approval voting might be easier to implement since we wouldn’t have to change our ballots
I mean, we would a little bit. We’d have have to allow for the cast and counted to include multiple people per seat. It’s easier to explain and understand for the layman than instant runoff, though, which is a big benefit too
Approval Voting is better
Consider
- A > B > C: 7
- C > B > A: 3
and every voter approves their top 2 candidates.
Who wins according to approval voting? B. Who wins against every opponent 1-on-1? A.
Quoting my other comment
A more mathematically sound method would be better: there are several.
Who wins according to approval voting? B. Who wins against every opponent 1-on-1? A.
I mean, yes. That is the point of approval. A is the clear favorite for 70% of voters. But 30% of voters like him least of all or not at all. The end result of an instant runoff or fptp election would mean that A wins and leaves 30% of voters feeling like the worst possible outcome happened. I dont consider 30% of voters hating their new circumstances as a win.
With Approval voting, you vote for every individual for whom you would be okay with winning (and you get to decide your criteria for what makes someone an acceptable choice). So the winner is the one that the maximum number of people feel like, by whatever criteria they themselves judged the candidates, they are acceptable and they can get behind that winner. In your example B wins. B was nobody’s absolute favorite, but absolutely everybody approves of them as a leader. I consider that a win. Democracy is about compromise. B is compromise incarnate. Yes, that does tend to push toward the middle, but again, that is the nature of compromise.
My problem with Instant Runoff/Ranked Choice is that it also should normally push toward the middle, but it often doesn’t when the election is highly polarized. Change your example just a bit:
- A > B: 49
- B > C > A: 3
- C > B: 48
In the first runoff, B is eliminated even though he was ranked 1st or 2nd by every voter. C wins even though 49 percent of the voters didn’t even rank C. It’s hard to argue, even, that that outcome is better than FPTP where A would have one becuase at least then only 48 percent didn’t even rank them. Either way, there is no compromise here. One of the extreme candidates wins with barely majority support. B, who would have won the approval vote with 100% never even stood a chance in this election as he was nobody’s first choice. Ranked choice gives too much preference to favorites which can still end up with extreme polarization even if people aren’t intentionally voting that way.
But I’m not shitting on Instant Runnoff/Ranked choice, or whatever we call it. It’s a step in the right direction and gives people the freedom to truly and freely support third parties that better align with thier ideals without (much) fear of spoiling the vote. And for both systems, the absolute worse case scenario for both Approval and Ranked Choice voting is that every single voter does not participate in the spirit of the system, tries to game it, and only ranks/approves of a single candidate. Only their absolute favorite will get their vote. Nobody else is even good enough. You know that that result is? Exactly what we have now. First Past The Post/Plurality. Kind of fitting that what we have now is rock bottom, huh?
So in approval voting, for each candidate c, their approvals A꜀ and rejections V — A꜀ are complements of all votes V, so they always sum to the same total
|A꜀| + |V — A꜀| = |V|
so whoever has the most approvals has the fewest rejections.
That’s a sound argument: upvoted.
Instant Runoff/Ranked Choice
I’m not in favor of those, either: was primarily concerned with the Condorcet winner as quoted before, which those methods also fail.
What you really need to end is the winner takes all thing. That’s the full bs that keeps it locked to 2 parties.
It’s called Plurality voting or First Past The Post. And yes, it’s garbage. Any other system is better. Ranked Choice/Instant Runoff, Approval voting. There are others too I’m sure
RCV is straightforward: Voters have the option to rank candidates in order of preference: first, second, third and so forth. If your first choice doesn’t have a chance to win, your ballot counts for your next choice.
The preferential ranked ballot is fine. However, the method for determining winner is flawed: it won’t always pick the Condorcet winner (ie, the candidate who would win the majority of votes against every opponent in a 1-on-1 election) when it exists.
Example:
- A > B > C: 35
- C > B > A: 34
- B > C > A: 31
Who wins according to instant run-off? C. Who wins against every opponent 1-on-1? B.
This has been known for ages (& why we have mathematicians). A more mathematically sound method would be better: there are several.
They’ll never change to a system that makes it harder to cheat
My state had it on the 2024 ballot but the idiot voters bought into the propaganda and struck it down.
Which state? If it was CO, that bill sucked, and was poisoned by the inclusion of the “jungle primary into top 4 ranked choice” thing. I did a lot of research and talking to people. I really really believe that reforming our voting system to ranked choice, approval voting, or almost anything other than FPTP, but the CO bill was ranked choice in name only.
AZ
RCV is the way, or some derivative of that. It also encourages bipartisan cooperation rather than the endless gridlocks and stalemates we see commonly with party politics. I appreciate that more people are bringing this topic into the mainstream discussion.
The single transferable vote is way better:
The single transferable vote (STV) or proportional-ranked choice voting (P-RCV) is a multi-winner electoral system in which each voter casts a single vote in the form of a ranked ballot. Voters have the option to rank candidates, and their vote may be transferred according to alternative preferences if their preferred candidate is eliminated or elected with surplus votes, so that their vote is used to elect someone they prefer over others in the running. STV aims to approach proportional representation based on votes cast in the district where it is used, so that each vote is worth about the same as another.
Not sure about this: the same argument applies here.
Consider
- A > B > C: 35
- C > B > A: 34
- B > C > A: 31
Who wins according to single transferable vote for 1 available seat? C. Who wins against every opponent 1-on-1? B.
I think there are more mathematically sound methods.
It’s my understanding they all have an issue such as this where choosing a second pick still can spoil your first or such that some other candidate wins which was not the top choice due to ranking spoilers.
choosing a second pick still can spoil your first
Unsure what that means.
This example shows a violation of the Condorcet winner criterion, and the articles I linked to identify methods that lack this issue, so not all methods have that issue. Some articles on those methods include a nice comparison table of methods over a range of criteria: they vary.
While ranked voting methods in general have some unavoidable issues, this isn’t one of them.
Basically exactly what I was alluding to, they all have some issue so it’s not so simple, but not as severe as fptp.
I think that defect pointed out is a pretty bad one.
When we have research, we shouldn’t ignore it. It doesn’t take that long to review readily found information & make an informed decision.
Changing a voting system is a significant undertaking. We got FPTP without adequate research: I would not like a repeat of that mistake with the first non-garbage idea that pops into people’s heads when a better choice could have been easily made.
Instant-runoff voting (IRV) is the single-winner analogue of STV. It is also called single-winner ranked-choice voting and preferential voting
Seems like STV is an extension of ranked choice voting for the special case of multiple-winner elections.
And slightly fancier than approval voting for multiple winner elections.
I like that. I’m still going to support any improvement to the system, though, even if it’s not my preferred solution. Even, if we just got ranked-choice voting, we’d still have more influence on further improvements to the system, like moving to STV.
This is really the only realistic way we can stave off fascism. The primary system first gives right-wing candidates incentive to be as extreme as possible. The first-past-the-post general election then gives a disproportionate amount of votes to that candidate. Because two candidates will always rationally absorb less-competitive candidates’ bases since people vote for harm reduction, it’s nearly impossible to purposefully get a candidate that reflects the general public’s priorities and values.
The only way to break out of that cycle is changing the voting system. If we weren’t stuck on the news-cycle rollercoaster, and if we prioritized fixing the foundation of democracy rather than chasing causes, we could have focused on this and done it after 2016 (or even better, after 2000). Instead we are just going in circles.
This is a good place to start: https://fairvote.org/who-we-are/our-strategy/
The biggest problem with adoption is that the legislators that are needed to make this change only have their job because of the primary system. Many of them would never be elected in a ranked choice system so they would be actively firing themselves and losing the power they have. The Republicans fully know that they’re actually a minority despite their claims, every single voter survey shows their policies are unpopular to the majority of Americans. They would be actively destroying their party by supporting ranked choice voting.
Some States have ways of the electorate proposing laws directly, that the legislature doesn’t have control over, which helps combat this, but that’s only some States, and nothing at the national level. That’s essentially the only way we can shift away from this first past the post system at a national level, shifting to ranked choice at the state level until we whittle enough power away from the fascist party to actually have change.
Some cities in my state started using RCV for local elections. Then, almost immediately, the state legislature made an amendment to our constitution banning any voting system other than FPTP…
There are a number of states that have implemented ranked choice in various localities. That’s effectively the strategy being followed by Fair vote. State level changes since that’s where there is most agility. Do that enough and eventually national changes will seem obvious and overdue.
But really, what we could have done and can do is require at a minimum, as a litmus test, candidates who support RCV.
The more states demonstrate that it works, the easier it becomes to convince the nation.
We gotta figure out how to get out of the nasty self-reinforcing cycle we’re in. Yeah, we absolutely need ranked choice or some other fair voting system, but is that likely with the amount of money that goes into elections these days? But can we get money out with the politicians we have right now?
The usual avenues seem useless - we need to find another way to enforce change.
That was exactly my thought when OP said to “push for” legislation. How exactly? If “representatives” only listen to money and votes, and the people have no money, then the only way to push is to vote differently.
I imagine this would be hard to count and validate
STV began permanent and wider adoption throughout Australia beginning in 1907 and the 1910s. The single transferable vote system, using contingent ranked votes, has been adopted in Ireland, South Africa, Malta, and approximately 40 cities in the United States and Canada. The single transferable vote system has also been used to elect legislators in Canada, South Africa and India.
If the Aussies could figure it out a hundred years ago, one would think America could also be up for the task. Then again, America.
Alaska already does it
The problem is not the voting mechanics. The problem is that there are a lot of idiots voting. Were you around for the 2024 election?
More Americans didn’t vote in the 2024 election than voted for Trump. Plenty of Trump voters acknowledged that they didn’t like him. If people had more than two choices, they’re less likely to not vote or to vote for the fascist.
A huge part of the problem is the voting mechanics. People are forced to back candidates they don’t support because of a moronic two-party system that only makes sense as a historical relic, and barely even then.
Will this change the minds of MAGA voters to not vote for a racist dipshit? Your proposal does not deal with the large amount of people who voted for the current jerk. You have a hammer and everything looks like a nail to you.
It’s worth remembering that the majority of votes cast for President in 2024 were for a candidate other than Donald Trump; he got less than 50% of the votes that were cast for President. Making it so that those majority of votes aren’t automatically split (and thus diminished) can be impactful, imo.
you misunderstand, I think. The number of people who voted for 47 is a product of the current voting system. changing the system will do a few things:
some people who voted for 47 may have still selected them as their first choice, but in a different system with ranked choices, one of their second or third choices may have been elected instead, if that candidate had more support overall from a greater majority of the voters (depending on the system uses to select the winner) but basically: better to have a large majority’s agreed second choice than a tiny majority’s first choice
secondly, some people who voted for 47 may have chosen someone else as their first choice if they did not feel it was the only way to make sure their least favorite candidate wouldn’t be elected - a ranked system removes the “spoiler” effect.
so if you see that people who voted the way they did, did so because of the FTTP system AND importantly how the FTTP system can be manipulated with certain types of propaganda, meticulously targeted, to elect an extreme candidate, then it’s not a matter of first “changing their minds,” and more a matter of having a system that elects the representative that most represents most of the people. that is an effective tool against extremism.
Ranked choice also opens up for people voting for the “safe” choice while still expressing discontent by ranking another much less viable option representing their real preference. This also generates a strong signal of how strong support alternative candidates have, giving them a significant advantage in determining when it’s worth campaigning
