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Common Dreams reports
Election reform advocates on [April 18] praised a decision by Maine's Supreme Court, upholding the use of ranked-choice voting for the state's upcoming primary elections, saying the ruling demonstrated that the court heeded the demands of Maine voters.
[...]Unlike in traditional voting, in which the candidate with the largest share of votes wins--even if he or she is far from capturing a majority of the support--in ranked choice voting, voters rank each candidate in order of preference. If no candidate has a majority after the first count, the least-popular contender is eliminated, voters' ballots are added to the totals of their second-ranked candidates, and the ballots are recounted. The eliminations and recounts continue until one candidate has a majority.
Supporters of the system say it increases voter turnout and proportional representation.
Maine's June 12 multi-party primary elections, in which voters will choose candidates for governor and congressional districts, will now make history as the first state election to use ranked-choice voting.
Fifty-two percent of Maine voters supported the system in a November 2016 ballot initiative, but lawmakers passed a bill last year delaying its implementation until December 2021 and argued that the state could not use a new voting system without direction from the legislature. The state Senate also threatened to repeal ranked-choice voting altogether if it could not pass a constitutional amendment by then.
More than 77,000 Maine residents signed a petition saying any repeal of the system by the legislature should be voided.
"The Maine legislature has changed or repealed all four of the initiatives passed by Maine voters in 2016", said Kyle Bailey of the Committee for Ranked Choice Voting in a statement on Tuesday. "Today's decision by the Maine Supreme Court confirms that the Maine people are sovereign and have the final say."
The Portland Press Herald, Maine's largest circulation daily newspaper, has extensive background details in their April 17th story: Ranked-choice voting will be used for June primaries, Maine supreme court rules.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 19 2018, @01:27PM (4 children)
Yes, it's a deceptive name for IRV, which behaves exactly as you describe. It's deceptive because "ranked-choice" literally describes a type of ballot, and there are several ways to determine a winner from a stack of ranked ballots. IRV is just one of them (and one of the worst), but its proponents try to remove the others from discussion by equating ranked ballots with IRV.
Ranked ballots in general have the fundamental weakness of pretending all preferences have the same strength, rather than allowing voters to specify relative strength of preferences. But Condorcet methods at least listen to all the preferences expressed. IRV, on the other hand, ignores most of the information on the ballots in each round
Range/score ballots are not only more expressive, but can be counted in one round, and summed by precincts, exactly as we do with plurality votes.
Your described situation is a real problem for ranked ballots, because there's no way to tell whether H>Q>T means "love H, like Q, hate T", or "love H, hate Q, hate T just a tiny bit more" -- is Q universally disliked, or universally tolerated? Ranked ballots simply don't let the voters tell you (most ranked systems won't even let you state an explicit non-preference -- there's no way to vote H=Q>T or H>Q=T); you need range ballots to make this distinction.
But in a situation with more than three candidates, it can become pretty obvious that the unfairly eliminated candidate was in fact weakly preferred rather than weakly despised; consider the four-candidate race where the vote is more-or-less evenly split among these three ballots:
A>D>x>x
B>D>x>x
C>D>x>x
Here D, despite being the universal second choice, will be eliminated in the first round for not being anyone's first choice.
(Score: 2) by tangomargarine on Thursday April 19 2018, @06:45PM
Why would you even rank a candidate you hated? Unless you have to rank everyone, just don't write anything next to the people you hate; that way there's no possible way you can accidentally vote for them.
"Is that really true?" "I just spent the last hour telling you to think for yourself! Didn't you hear anything I said?"
(Score: 2) by HiThere on Thursday April 19 2018, @08:45PM
I prefer Condorcet voting, but IRV has the advantage that its easy to describe. And it's so much better than plurality wins that I would hesitate to criticize it.
Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 19 2018, @09:26PM
Read half of your post. But with that situation "love A, hate B, hate C just a tiny bit more", what if you actually hate it and leave it blank? Then if A gets eliminated as an option because it was the least popular that vote will be counted as blank as there is no option B. Nonetheless for voters who did not hate B or C that will be counted as they will fill in the option with they second favourite candidate
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday April 20 2018, @07:27AM
That's probably the example I was thinking of, I just didn't remember the details. The problem is much more obvious with four choices rather than three.