A DC campaign has collected more than 40,000 signatures to put an initiative on the city’s ballot that would open primary elections to independent voters and implement ranked choice voting in all District elections.

Seeing as how some people here on Lemmy get upset at any mention of Ranked Choice Voting and respond that, in their opinion, it’s not perfect, and that we should therefore keep the voting system we have while we debate which alternative is perfect for several decades, allow me to preemptively respond.

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RCV has the momentum and is infinitely superior to what we have now. Don’t let perfect be the enemy of fantastic.

I’d be happy if a community chose one of the other options. I don’t care. They’re all better than what we have and we should be applauding every city, county and state that switches to any of them. That’s the purpose of this post.

Trying to demonize one option because you don’t think it’s perfect is just muddying the waters and subjecting us to decades of more of the shit sandwich we have now while we debate which alternative is flawless (hint: none of them are).

You’ll never get everyone to agree on which option is best. A vast majority of us can agree, though, that FPTP is garbage, and RCV is way way better.

It’s like you’re sitting there with nothing to eat but spoiled meat and it’s making you deathly sick, someone comes by and offers you a fresh juicy hamburger, and you respond, “No! I’ll accept nothing less than Filet Mignon!” Dude! You’re eating spoiled meat! Take the damn burger!

  • Null User Object@programming.devOP
    0·
    4 months ago

    But they’re not introducing nuance, they’re invoking FUD.

    Their arguments aren’t, “RCV is way better than FPTP, and it’s great that communities are adopting it, but I happen to like this similar system even better. Let me tell you about it.” I would love to see discussions like that.

    Instead, their arguments are “RCV bad. [Other system] good.”. Their arguments play right into the hands of those that want to delay/avoid change so that they can continue to manipulate elections.

    • bolexforsoup@lemmy.blahaj.zone
      0·
      4 months ago

      Who are “they”? What other systems are they advocating for? All I ever see on Lemmy is people hating FPTP (rightfully so) and in favor of RCV (rightfully so) with the occasional person remarking on limitations or (more commonly in my experience) saying it’s not a magic bullet solution and is only part of comprehensive reform. An kmportant part of it, no doubt, but still a part and a lot of people seem to overestimate RCV‘s ability to save us.

      Pointing this out does not make one against RCV.