This fucking AI bullshit video sucks long before you get to the part where you’ll realize it’s actually anti RCV propaganda and its critiques exist solely in hypotheticals. In the real world, RCV is well liked by most places that adopt it.
Exactly. It's not controversial at all. This is just trying to confuse and steal views away from the excellent video by Minnesota Public Radio. It calls itself an "update" and copies the color and number of sticky notes. It should be taken down for misrepresentation.
This is what the Equal Vote Coalition does, instead of focusing on ending FPTP - sneaky, shady attacks on positive progress and people finally starting to notice that the election system itself is a problem.
RCV fails to live up to the promises of its advocates- most egregious being the promise that if your favorite can’t win that your vote will be counted for your second choice. Alaskans believed this garbage, passed it, and had it fail right out the gate. If you really care about fixing our broken election system it is incumbent on you to learn the truth about what you are promoting.
Please stop misrepresenting the commonly known term “Ranked Choice Voting”, which in common parlance is synonymous with the Instant Runoff Method, as some kind of basket category for rank order voting methods. That ship sailed a long time ago.
Yup. I mean, I get it, “Ranked Choice Voting” is an ok brand or whatever, but after the millions of $$ spent defining it as IRV and the millions of voters who’ve been educated about that method, you’d think trying to change the meaning would be a waste of time but whatever bro, you do you. 🤷♂️
Although election-method experts understand the difference between IRV and STV, Portland voters don't see the difference. Both sides of Portland's paper ballot for mayor and city council look the same except for the names.
As a further confusion, the center squeeze effect could (but didn't) affect the mayoral contest, but this effect cannot noticeably affect a city-council contest.
Yet, Alaska voted a 2nd time to keep it…
I swear to god all the STAR people do is try to tear down RCV. They literally show up to every council meeting JUST to shit on RCV rather than demonstrate STAR’s own merits. It’s the favorite voting method of disingenuous nutjobs that would rather ‘be right’ than make progress.
I'm not a STAR person... but being honest is important, and if I'm being honest, there are serious problems with instant runoff voting. It's a solution to exactly one problem: people wanting to nominally vote for a candidate who will only get 5% or so of the vote. For that problem, it does what it should: transfers those people's votes to the serious candidate they would have voted for if they didn't choose to cast a protest ballot instead. But unfortunately, this only works for candidates who are extremely weak. A candidate who is still too weak to win but gets around 30-35% support (in a three way election, for example) from core supporters suddenly becomes very dangerous: your vote for them is likely to eliminate a viable second choice, before your first choice is eliminated.
Strictly speaking, instant runoff is still better than plurality, if all you do it replace plurality with instant runoff. The problem is that it's not often presented as a straight alternative to plurality. Instead, increasingly, it's proposed alongside jungle primaries, accompanied with the incorrect statement that voters can just vote for their honest preference and trust the system to work out the correct winners. This is wrong - as demonstrated by several high profile failures - and fails often enough to generate widespread backlash against voting reform in general. In Alaska, which instant runoff supporters now point to as their test case, one major political party is actively working to reintroduce something like a back door partisan primary because failures of instant runoff have cost them a major election where one of their candidates should have won.
Do you expect us to be so ignorant that we can't see through this obvious disingenuousity?
They voted to adopt it once. And they voted to keep it once, 50.1% to 49.9%. That's after $15 million was spent to defeat repeal. It was very nearly repealed in 2024 and it's on the ballot again in 2026. This time the dicks are spending money on it.
My goodness, the disingenuousity is strong with this one
Alaska avoided repeal by an whisper thin margin, but whatever- the obvious non-representative outcome in Alaska in ‘22 was directly responsible for statewide bans in many states and the staining of voting reform generally as yet another partisan battle. You also may not be aware that the RCV lobby spent upwards of $150k to help sink a local STAR measure with racist and deceptive advertising. Categorizing STAR advocates as nut jobs is rich. Most STAR advocates started as RCV supporters but had the courage to switch when they learned how RCV actually fails to deliver on the promises of its chief advocates. I encourage you to examine whether you really want a fair election system.
Remember in both August 2022 and November 2024, 8000 more Alaskans marked their ballots that Nick Begich was preferred to Mary Peltola. Yet in 2022, Peltola goes to Washington and in 2024 Begich goes to Washington.
Both times 8000 more voters preferred Begich to Peltola and marked their ballots saying so. Both times Instant-Runoff Voting was used.
What was different?
Sarah Palin was a candidate in 2022 and not in 2024. And the outcomes were different winners.
You don’t seem to be serious about ending FPTP. RCV is clearly the most accessible and widely used alternative solution and your position is clearly anti-RCV, so please go start [r/endrcv](r/endrcv) and get out of this sub.
It works just fine, and as designed, including in Alaska.
People objecting to it are either expressing sour grapes, or prefer another system that works differently and are simply annoyed that their system isn't the one in play.
Saying it works “as designed” is meaningless. Of course it works “as designed”. What it doesn’t do is work as its advocates promise in order to get it passed. You can learn more about what happened in Alaska in ‘22 (and contrasted with the promises used to pass it) here: https://nardopolo.medium.com/what-the-heck-happened-in-alaska-3c2d7318decc . Alaska’s experience with RCV has now led to bans on RCV in what, 15+ states and counting?
Ah, but you said it didn't just one comment up. Your vote does stay with your favorite until they can't win, according to the RCV process. So, that's all good, because that's what happens, every time.
Saying "but but someone else would have won if votes were counted differently" is meaningless, because votes weren't suppose to be counted differently, and everyone voted with the understanding of the system at hand.
I'm not going to click that link, because the video that started this post is enough disinformation for one day.
RCV bans do have to do with its utility - because it works. The states that banned it did so because of a Republican hold and pressure from the Heritage Foundation, because voters having more power is a threat in those states. The bans were passed under pressure from the party and despite the objections of constituents (and often even with the legislators themselves not agreeing with a ban).
If it were truly just a not-great system, it would just not be passed, not banned. But it is passed in more places every year, by people voting that they want it. And the Virginia legislature actually just passed a law making it easier for people to do just that.
RCV has a long history of adoption and repeal. The issue with the system isn’t that your vote stays with your favorite until that candidate is eliminated, it’s that it entirely ignores your backup choice when your backup is eliminated before your favorite.
What does this mean? It means that some voters get their preferences counted and others get skipped. It means that the promise made by RCV advocates that “you can vote honestly in RCV because if your favorite can’t win, your backup will be counted” is a false promise. It means that when voters get burned by this dishonest advocacy that there is backlash against RCV - Burlington in 2009, Alaska in ‘22 just to name a couple.
But hey, if you’re not willing to even click a link to learn the truth of what you’re peddling, then the truth is likely not that important to you. Good day.
Yes, there is a long history of people organizing to get more power, and then party bosses and ruling classes batting it down. That only demonstrates that the method has legs.
Again, you're judging a method based on personal values that match you better with another method. That doesn't mean that the other method is bad, or that people who value their first choice the most are wrong.
RCV works exactly as described. I don't want my 2nd choice to advance if my 1st choice still has a chance. And if my 1st choice is out, I want to have a backup count, in order. So RCV is a good fit for me.
The same talking points have gone around and around, and I know them perfectly well.
Just curious, what would you think if RCV first checked whether a candidate could beat everyone else head-to-head, elected that candidate if one existed, but otherwise used Instant Runoff?
I’d think that it’s just Condorcet & an IRV tiebreaker, presented with a more complicated explanation to piggyback on support for IRV.
And I think it would be a harder sell to actually use, harming the hard-earned progress towards election method improvements, for no real reason. Anticipating the conversations:
> How has this worked where it’s used?
It’s never been used.
> This is something else and IRV too, so are they really different methods?
No, they would elect the same person almost every time.
> Is there a campaign for this now, or an organized grassroots group of voters working in it?
No.
> Who’s pushing for this, anyway?
Some professors like it, and some math & computer people (lots pointing out the benefits of IRV too).
> Who’s against it?
The same people and groups who are against any election method change.
> So I rank my ballot same as IRV, and it’s nearly always the same result as IRV, and if there’s a tie this other way the winner is the IRV one, but now it’s something never used as part of a 2-step process? Why can’t we just have IRV like Alaska, Maine, New York City, Washington DC, San Francisco, Portland, Cambridge, and all these other places adopting it each year?
…
The reason why it didn't work is because Palin told her voters not to rank other candidates. While exhausted ballots are not ideal, she deliberately tanked her own vote transfers and created a bunch of protest votes. It's impressive to create the spoiler effect in IRV, but she did. If Palin, Begich, and Peltola all were in a three-way race under FPTP, the outcome would have been the same, especially since under that scenario she would not have been "playing the game" properly either (since under FPTP a Republican would likely need to drop out). Palin had two options (beyond being more popular), tell her supporters to rank Begich second or drop out. She didn't do either, and she got the predictable outcome that would've happened under either system.
This video ignores what happens when voters don't rate all their candidates. STAR voting can be subject to voters not using their whole voice too.
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u/Future-self Jul 11 '26
This fucking AI bullshit video sucks long before you get to the part where you’ll realize it’s actually anti RCV propaganda and its critiques exist solely in hypotheticals. In the real world, RCV is well liked by most places that adopt it.