Voters don't vote for people that voters want to vote for.

[edhopper]

I can't follow the logic either.

[Skittles]

1. you got that right

it is one sorry state of affairs

[pat_k]

2. Ranked choice voting

If people could stop worrying they might be "throwing away" a vote for who they REALLY wanted, they'd be more likely to vote for that person.

I often wonder how the primaries would have played out if state Democratic parties had shifted to ranked choice.

With ranked choice voting, vote your heart, and pick the "ok, but not best" as second choice... and on down the line if you have a third, acceptable choice. If your first choice doesn't get enough votes, the votes are reallocated. No "wasted" votes. If there is a candidate voters really want, but tend not to vote for because they fear the vote would be "wasted" on a candidate who has little chance of winning ( fear the ideas aren't "mainstream" enough to get support or some crap), with ranked choice, I think the candidate would have a shot at a getting a number of votes that better reflects their "real" level of support.

Also, if it takes reallocation of votes from another candidate to get you to a majority you know where "your" votes came from -- what ideas those voters actually preferred. In a larger field, there are no plurality wins that allow the candidate to claim most voters are truly "for" them.

Ultimately, ranked choice general election is the only way we will ever have a shot at breaking out of the two party system. The place to start is in our own primaries.

[Skittles]

3. it is hard to take, who had to drop out and who is left

very disconcerting

[pat_k]

7. Agree.

I could be wrong, but I think things would have played out very differently if our primaries had been run with a ranked choice system.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ranked-choice_voting_in_the_United_States

[Midnightwalk]

5. I don't understand

I believe winning is how we get progressive policies enacted.

So my first choice is always going to be who I think is progressive enough that can win.

What would change my mind? If it made a difference in who got elected in local races like for state office or the us house.

I’m not against ranked choice. I like it because it gives us more details. I don’t understand the arguments of how it solves some of the things i read claimed

[pat_k]

6. With ranked choice, the winner must....

... get more than 50%. If no candidate gets more than 50%, then the votes from the candidate who received the least are reallocated to the candidates those voters specified as their second choice.

You can look up how the reallocation works, but it is an iterative process with a clear set of rules.

Of course, a voter doesn't have to "rank" all the candidates. If they want, they can just specify a first choice, and reject all the others. Or they can pick a first, second, and third, or whatever.

With this system, a voter doesn't need to pick between progressive candidate A and progressive candidate B, risking splitting the vote and having both lose to a mainstream dem who actually has less support than A and B combined. You pick your top choice, A or B, and put the other as your second. If A or B gets more than 50% on the first round, they win. If none of the candidates get 50% on the first round, there is a reallocation process. Your second choice vote counts.

You can't claim someone staying in is being a "spoiler" and splitting vote. Lower vote count candidates can stay in and fight for their ideas. No one can accuse them of being "spoilers" because, if they don't get enough votes, the votes get reallocated to the candidate their supporters found acceptable enough to rank below them. But the candidate that "gets" their votes, knows what those voters really wanted.

As it is, votes for a candidate who doesn't make 15% (in a given district, for district delegates, or at the state level, for state deletes) are "wasted." But if voters have ranked choices, those votes would get reallocated. You get a "say" in where they go. In the end, the winner knows exactly where their votes came from. They know they owe their win to votes they picked up on the second, or third round. They know that, although they were first choice for a majority of the votes counted for them, X percent actually preferred Q's policies, and Y percent actually preferred Z's policies and need to consider the desires of those voters too.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ranked-choice_voting_in_the_United_States

[Midnightwalk]

8. I still don't see how some claims work

I was reacting to this kind of statement

If people could stop worrying they might be "throwing away" a vote for who they REALLY wanted, they'd be more likely to vote for that person.

Even with ranked choice my first choice would and should reflect who I think has the best chance of winning. If we win we make progress if we lose we get worse than nothing.

Maybe after a decade or so of controlling the presidency, the senate and the house I’d be comfortable enough of not losing that I’d consider policies. Maybe not if Republican policy remains as bad as it is.

I made no claim about so called spoiler candidates but I think it was part of a cut and paste That’s fine I appreciate the answer. I’m not sure about this claim being a good thing. We’re getting close to six months before the general election. Getting to a nominee is important to me because there is finite money, attention span and energy.

I’d rather spend more of those resources on winning the election then having say 6 candidates fighting a cage match for another three or four months.

Still I don’t have any problem of letting people recording their second choice. It might help a brokered convention situation like DU was worried about a couple of weeks ago.

Our system with disproportionate representation and two year presidential campaigns has more fundamental problems than ranked choice can solve. Ranked choose is an easier change to pass but in my opinion it doesn’t address the biggest issues.

Just my opinions.

[pat_k]

9. Your talking about your personal assessment of who could win over Trump?

First, in a true democracy, a winner should win with the majority, not a plurality. Ranked choice voting, instant run offs, or actual follow up run offs, require this.

Personally, I think both Sanders an Biden have very big downsides against Trump. I will not get into a debate on this here, but, in my assessment, there were other candidates in the field I who would have a) done better against Trump, and b) gotten more votes if people weren't concerned about splitting and "wasting" a vote for either their actual preferred "moderate" pick or actual preferred "progressive" pick.

Ranked choice takes away the tendency to go with whoever is ahead, simply because they are ahead, not because they are preferred. You can argue, but in our voting system, this is a tendency. Not all voters have this tendency, but many, many do. I can't tell you the number of times I heard something like, Buttigeig (or Klobucher, or whoever) is my favorite, but I want to beat Bernie, and they are not doing well enough. Or Warren is my favorite, but she's not doing well enough. Bernie has a better shot now, so I have to go with him.

[Midnightwalk]

10. More discussion

I was reading more into “preferred” than you might have meant. You seem to agree that preferred can or should include electability not necessarily policy.

Ahead in your last paragraph is a little funny to me because if one’s preference is based on electability being ahead is one indicator of whether one is thinking correctly. I get what you say but if one’s preference is based in electability polling or doing bad in some primaries should make such a person pay some attention to “being ahead” as a sanity check.

I read the wiki article and it isn’t clear anyone’s actually tracked changes to voting patterns. Game theory might tell us what direction to expect a change in but is there some data that tells us how a change to expect.

I appreciate not wanting to argue about alternative candidates than the remaining two. But most of the field dropped prior to any voting, the rest before most voting happened. How much of that was driven by cash vs polling and expectation of election results. It’s hard for me to tell whether we should expect a big change or tiny change in behavior if we used ranked voting.

Again I have no argument for not wanting ranked voting it is more I don’t find it obvious that it effectively addresses the current set of problems. I’m fine with an argument that it’s an easy change with the potential of making a noticeable improvement.

Thanks for discussing. Reading up was interesting.

[pat_k]

11. Thanks to you too.

Regarding changes in voting patterns. I am not aware of analyses either, but will be poking around.

As a general "impression", ranked choice at the general election level seems to open thing up to more parties -- more candidates staying in and more choice because the whole "spoiler" factor is avoided. Nations with ranked choice certainly seem to have more parties going, but perhaps there are other factors that led to that. I do I think our method of voting is keeping us locked into a two party system. Any third party who tries to run is branded "spoiler" for taking votes away from one of the parties. If those third party votes weren't "lost," there would be no "spoiler" factor and a third party candidate might have a shot at taking hold.

[stopdiggin]

4. yes. we have to stop making those voters ...

make the choices that they're making. it's almost .. undemocratic!