I've heard the arguments for approval voting, and I'm sure it's all the things you mention and more, but people don't get it. I don't get it. I don't want to vote for both Hillary and Bernie. I want to vote for Bernie, and then only if Bernie can't win, would I let my vote go to Hillary. You can explain to me until you're blue in the face why approval is strictly better even in this situation, but I am emotionally attached to my vote counting for Bernie more than any other candidate, so reason isn't going to work on my lizard brain.
I know, it sucks. Politics is terrible. But we have some momentum behind RC/IRV so we should use it and stop the single-vote FPTP system that's plagued us for centuries. Anything is better than that. So let's join forces and get behind whatever has momentum even if it's not technically the best.
Approval voting seems to me to be worse on all counts that the previous commenter was levying against ranked-choice. To your point, the spoiler effect seems like it would be much worse with approval than with a ranked ballot, since highly partisan voters would have little reason to approve of any candidate other than the single candidate they want in office. Approving of anyone else lessens their candidate's chance of winning.
A ranked choice ballot at least requires you to assign a unique value to every candidate on the ballot: you can honestly rank your second choice without being concerned that doing so undermines your first.
>A ranked choice ballot at least requires you to assign a unique value to every candidate on the ballot: you can honestly rank your second choice without being concerned that doing so undermines your first.
That's highly implementation dependent. Where I live we have ranked-choice ballots for local primary elections, while the local general elections are FPTP. State and Federal elections are all FPTP for primary and general elections.
While I am free to rank up to five candidates when filling out my ballot, I am not required to use all five choices.
I can just ignore all that if I choose and just rank one candidate first and leave the rest of the ballot blank. Or I can rank multiple candidates, but I'm not required to "assign a unique value to every candidate on the ballot."
In fact, if there are more than five candidates for a particular office, I can only rank five of them.
All that said, I'm absolutely in favor of RCV and wish we had it for all elections, not just local primary elections.
It sounds like the local ranked-choice implementation is unnecessarily complex and constrained. A simple "rank all candidates from 1 (most preferred) to n (least preferred)" for n candidates seems like the better solution.
>It sounds like the local ranked-choice implementation is unnecessarily complex and constrained. A simple "rank all candidates from 1 (most preferred) to n (least preferred)" for n candidates seems like the better solution.
I'm sure you're right. Unfortunately, I'm not the person you'd need to convince.
Here's contact information[0] for the relevant folks, and thanks for taking an interest. I'm sure my fellow townspeople will be grateful for your guidance. You have my thanks for stepping up to help us improve our voting systems!
For your reference, here's some background on the how the process came to be[1][2][3][4]
[0] https://www.vote.nyc/page/contact-us
[1] https://ballotpedia.org/New_York_City_Ballot_Question_1,_Ele...
[2] https://apnews.com/article/nyc-ranked-choice-voting-explaine...
[3] https://rankthevotenyc.org/history-of-rcv-in-nyc/
[4] https://rankthevotenyc.org/what-we-learned-from-new-york-cit...
it's the worst of the commonly discussed alternatives.
https://www.rangevoting.org/BayRegsFig
Thank you for your expert opinion. Unlike yourself and your colleague[0], I am not an expert on voting systems and infrastructure.
I am just a consumer of such things and have exactly zero say in my town's approach to voting.
I do know that RCV is better than FPTP, even more so if we don't, at least, require a majority, and am glad my town is at least making a start at such things.
That said, I'd love to make it even better.
As I suggested[1] to your colleague, it would be terrific if your expertise could be used to improve the voting system where I live.
I'd expect that the folks[2] who make such decisions could be convinced to re-frame things in another referendum based upon the recommendations of you and your organization. I know I'd certainly appreciate it!
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47035812
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47036908
[2] https://www.vote.nyc/page/contact-us
LOL, people get it just fine. fargo adopted it by a 64% supermajority and st louis adopted it by a 68% supermajority.
https://approval.vote/
> You can explain to me until you're blue in the face why approval is strictly better even in this situation, but I am emotionally attached to my vote counting for Bernie more than any other candidate, so reason isn't going to work on my lizard brain.
but your actual strategy is to rank hillary in 1st because bernie can't win. or, in the case of my aunt, she preferred warren but voted biden to beat trump. she would have ranked them biden>warren>trump in a ranked election for that very reason. this is called "compromise strategy".
bro, approving both of them is better than being strategically forced to say that you prefer clinton to bernie or biden to warren.
Welp, you just proved my point. I still don't get it. I want to vote my preference and I don't want to vote Hillary and Bernie equally. shrug.