Ranked voting

[Belsnickel]

(09-04-2022, 09:30 AM)Forever Spinning Vinyl Wrote: I know exactly how it works and what it's intended to do. My point doesn't appear in this case because there was only three candidates because a 4th candidate dropped out.

Let me use this as an example.

Let's say that there are four people running for city librarian(not an electable position, just bear with me)
The four candidates are three authors and a raving lunatic you do not want in charge of a library.
Stephen King
Dean Koontz
Diane Palmer
Marjorie Taylor-Greene

Let's say that King and Koontz are both around 39%, Palmer with 12% and MTG with 10%.

Their first run is to grab all of MTG's 2nd place votes and apply them to their candidates. If the people voting for the least popular candidate have 90% 2nd place votes for King and 10% for Koontz, King now leads 48% to 40% due to the people voting for the person that's most out of touch. Then it goes to the last round and Palmer is eliminated. Her second place votes are 2/3 for Koontz and 1/3 for King. Their final round will be 52% for King and 48% for Koontz as the voters for two losing candidates made the final push.

But what if we look at the King and Koontz voter's 2nd place votes and over 1/2 of King's voters put Koontz as their #2 but very few of the Koontz voters put King as the #2? Suddenly things are flipped and we get what I think is a more balanced system that takes into account everybody's 2nd place votes, not just for the voters of the least popular candidates.


Personally, I think if they were going to implement a ranking system, they should come up with something similar to the college sports polls with points per ranking with six points available for three of the four candidates.

My #1 choice would be Koontz = 3 points
My #2 choice would be King = 2 points
My #3 choice would be Palmer = 1 point
#4 or no listing = 0 points

Most people already understand that system or know someone that can explain how simple it is. There would be no need of knockout rounds or transferring votes or any shit like that. It's a point based system that there is one decisive total when all of the votes are tabulated.

RCV is simple as well. The idea behind it is to require a majority of votes, like in a runoff, but not multiple elections. You're taking only the second choice of the eliminated candidates because the point of the second choice is that is who you would vote for if your first choice isn't running. So why would you count the second choice of those whose candidates are still in the running? That makes no sense.

Your system also would be difficult to implement and have to be constantly changing depending on how many candidates there were on a ballot as you would need to reassign point values and would be more difficult to handle for elections with multiple winners.