What is ranked choice voting?
This article is a great overview.
What’s happening in my state?
The same article lists some things, and Wikipedia has more details.
Here’s what on the ballot this year:
- Alaska is voting to repeal RCV
- Arizona is voting on a proposition for non-partisan primaries and RCV
- Colorado is voting on using RCV
- Connecticut is evaluating RCV for legislation in 2025
- District of Columbia is voting on using RCV
- Idaho is voting on using RCV
- Missouri is voting on banning RCV altogether
- Montana is voting on a proposition for non-partisan primaries
- Nevada is voting on using RCV for federal and state elections
- Oregon is voting on using RCV for federal and state elections
- South Dakota is voting on non-partisan top 2 primaries
- Texas has a group working on ranked choice voting
Register to vote, check your registration, make sure you’re in a position to fix voting. It’s important. It’s not as far away as you think.
Ireland uses ranked-choice voting - specifically Single Transferable Vote in Multi-Member-Constituencies, in the republic for all levels of government, and even in the north for local and Stormont.
Voting-system nerds reckon the irish found one of the best compromises, at it gives some kind of proportionality among the main parties, while also giving a good chance to maverick independents with local support.
Note that in the irish system there are no wasted votes - as the surplus (excess votes above the number needed to elect a candidate) are also transferred to later choices - this gets complicated when there are multiple steps… An obvious downside is that counting takes a long time (even several days following recent european elections - but there must be technical ways to solve that?)
Any Irish here to comment ?
Yeah I just woke up in the middle of the night so you’re in luck. :)
I love our voting system. All seems very logical when you have actually been through it once and it makes for a bit of excitement as transfers happen after each count.
You just number your candidates in order of preference essentially. If after a count they haven’t hit the required number for all seats to be filled the lowest gets eliminated. The eliminated candidates 2nd preference votes then become first preference for someone else.
This process repeats until all seats are filled.
I vote all the way down the ballot to the point of choosing between rankings of less desirable candidates until I hit “absolutely fucking not” level but honestly we don’t have too many in that category running here.
Edit: I’ll add that the only real down side is that you need to go off an and actually investigate the policies of independents. Many of them do get elected though.
There are helpful websites that pop up around each election to help. Some of them will ask you a series of questions and then tell you where each candidate falls on the issues you’ve been asked about.
Another edit: I bring my younger kids with me when voting so they get to see it in action and before the point where my choices would affect theirs but it’s taught in schools too. I remember doing mock elections on actual candidates in primary school.
Cool. I guess it’s different in cities - with more members per constituency - than in the sparsely populated west? Anyway I’m wondering how can the irish help influence the US - which seems to be the origin of this community (?). Also could help France - if they used a STV like Ireland, they wouldn’t need all those uncomfortable coalitions and désistements (withdrawals) before the second round (which wouldn’t be necessary). France also needs MMCs (as they had in the past) to help reduce the urban-rural polarisation.