this post was submitted on 23 Aug 2024
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I prefer ranked choice simply because I may “approve” of two candidates in the sense they’d do a good job, but prefer one candidate over the other. Ranked choice allows me to note my preference.
Hard agree anything is better than FPTP
It'd be quite ironic if they put this to a vote and FPTP wins because because the votes of its opponents are split between Ranked Choice and Approval Voting.
Among voting theorists they tend to pick approval. So far the only direct heads-up vote to choose between Approval and RCV had RCV win with about 70% vs 30%. But honestly that's pretty dang good for Approval considering how relatively unknown it is.
The problem I run into is that RCV can be nonmonotonic, where increasing a candidate's ranking can cause them to do worse and vice versa. For most elections this doesn't matter because the vast majority are uncompetitive, but it's the tight races where whacky things can happen. Occasionally RCV will fail to elect the Condorcet winner, who (when they exist) is the person who wins every head-to-head matchup.
I would agree that more major expression is better, except we're seeing evidence that even RCV is complicated enough to disenfranchise poor people at a disproportionate rate, something that doesn't happen under FPTP. The voting system needs to be simple enough that that doesn't happen, and we're lucky that Approval Voting happens to be very good at electing the most popular candidate. It's essentially a simultaneous approval rating poll, afterall.