The problem with ranked choice voting, and even approval voting: [View all]

[SaveTheMackerel]

First, I'm a fan of voters having more choices. But I distrust computerized counters.

The appeal of ranked choice voting is that people can rank the candidates, and that if their 1st choice does not win, maybe their 2nd choice will, so that they can express their true preference instead of trust the media about who is viable.


All ranked choice voting takes much longer to count. If we have as much vote counting fraud as we do no with just single vote, how much more fraud would be possible with IRV?

With Condorcet, a 5 person race has 5+4+3+2+1 = 15 head to head runoffs. It is susceptible to burying, which could lead to an A beats B beats C beats A cycle.

With Instant Runoff, if your 1st choice does is eliminated your vote does not necessarily go to your 2nd choice, since your 2nd choice may have been eliminated first.

Approval voting seems simpler, but even it has strategic voting that can anger all sides except the lucky winners. 5 candidates also means 5x as many votes to count. I think it is better than single vote, for a 1 round race, but not by a lot, and maybe not enough to justify the extra counting. Most proponents of Approval voting want a box next to each name, which you can check or leave blank. What if the counter then checks extra boxes? The ballot would not look spoiled.