I feel like you’re essentially saying Americans are too dumb for RCV to improve things. I’m intrigued by RCV, myself, but it’s hard to dismiss your point! (You put it more diplomatically, of course.)
What I don't get about open primaries is how they differ from a general election. If all candidates run in an open primary, why would you then need a general election. Does it mean that everyone gets to vote in the primaries for each party? RCV makes sense in a general election, and it also makes a 3rd, or 4th party more competitive. Would you be able to clear up my confusion on open primaries? Thanks.
And why should anyone trust our public institutions? Especially a gimmicky system like Rank-Choice-Voting?
What's wrong with having a system of paper ballots, where an agent of all interested parties are allowed to observe the count, and the totals are added in a centralized location and the results declared?
Only a relatively small number of voters need to be not-dumb for RCV to work in closeish elections. For a less incendiary example, see the 2018 election in ME-2 (still somewhat incendiary in that the R won first preferences, but the D won in the end - why do I think there'd have been less whining about RCV if results were reversed?).
One advantage of RCV in my mind is that in addition to selecting a winner, it provides a lot more information about the preferences of the voters. But then again I probably would have scored fine on the relevant portion of the LSAT - see my handle and avatar :)
The anti-RCV arguments I have read in relatively high-toned spots like NR seem to boil down to "under the current alignments, it's bad for Republicans", which is quite possibly true but not enormously convincing, except to the degree that a voting system needs broad buy in (which mostly at the national level means one where the Trumpy candidate wins most of the time).
It's amusing that the only way the Rs were able to win the VA governor's race was to have cautious RCV convention. Interestingly, there are polisci papers (mostly Woon) indicating that Trump might well have been the winner of a Republican RCV primary set in 2016 - contrary to the typical Republican excuse that he only won because of the extreme winner take all loading of the primaries. Admittedly *had* the Rs used RCV in their primaries, the dynamics probably would have been different since the other candidates would have spent less time attacking each other hoping to be the final not-Trump.
Your point about relative transparency is a good one in favor of a two-round system, which as you probably know is in use, together with the combo primary first round* in Washington and California (probably other places too for entities smaller than states).
*except in those states even if someone wins an absolute majority in round 1, there's still a round 2 with the top two.
I feel like you’re essentially saying Americans are too dumb for RCV to improve things. I’m intrigued by RCV, myself, but it’s hard to dismiss your point! (You put it more diplomatically, of course.)
What I don't get about open primaries is how they differ from a general election. If all candidates run in an open primary, why would you then need a general election. Does it mean that everyone gets to vote in the primaries for each party? RCV makes sense in a general election, and it also makes a 3rd, or 4th party more competitive. Would you be able to clear up my confusion on open primaries? Thanks.
And why should anyone trust our public institutions? Especially a gimmicky system like Rank-Choice-Voting?
What's wrong with having a system of paper ballots, where an agent of all interested parties are allowed to observe the count, and the totals are added in a centralized location and the results declared?
Only a relatively small number of voters need to be not-dumb for RCV to work in closeish elections. For a less incendiary example, see the 2018 election in ME-2 (still somewhat incendiary in that the R won first preferences, but the D won in the end - why do I think there'd have been less whining about RCV if results were reversed?).
One advantage of RCV in my mind is that in addition to selecting a winner, it provides a lot more information about the preferences of the voters. But then again I probably would have scored fine on the relevant portion of the LSAT - see my handle and avatar :)
The anti-RCV arguments I have read in relatively high-toned spots like NR seem to boil down to "under the current alignments, it's bad for Republicans", which is quite possibly true but not enormously convincing, except to the degree that a voting system needs broad buy in (which mostly at the national level means one where the Trumpy candidate wins most of the time).
It's amusing that the only way the Rs were able to win the VA governor's race was to have cautious RCV convention. Interestingly, there are polisci papers (mostly Woon) indicating that Trump might well have been the winner of a Republican RCV primary set in 2016 - contrary to the typical Republican excuse that he only won because of the extreme winner take all loading of the primaries. Admittedly *had* the Rs used RCV in their primaries, the dynamics probably would have been different since the other candidates would have spent less time attacking each other hoping to be the final not-Trump.
Your point about relative transparency is a good one in favor of a two-round system, which as you probably know is in use, together with the combo primary first round* in Washington and California (probably other places too for entities smaller than states).
*except in those states even if someone wins an absolute majority in round 1, there's still a round 2 with the top two.