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 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:
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
so whoever has the most approvals has the fewest rejections.
That’s a sound argument: upvoted.
I’m not in favor of those, either: was primarily concerned with the Condorcet winner as quoted before, which those methods also fail.