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!

  • themeatbridge@lemmy.world
    0·
    4 months ago

    Thank you for providing an example.

    Let’s say E is everyone’s second choice, but nobody’s first choice. E is the first candidate eliminated because E got 0% of the vote.

    Let’s say it shakes out like this:

    40% A E C B
    21% B E A C
    20% D E C B
    19% C E D B <- You

    40 A D 39 D B 21 B D

    60 D 40 A

    First round, E is eliminated despite being the most popular candidate by far.

    Second Round, C, followed by B. D wins.

    But if 3% of A voters switched to C, then A would have won because D would be eliminated, sending their votes to C, which would have eliminated B, sending those votes to A. But D and C voters hate A, so it’s in their best interest to also vote for B. And now we’re back to fptp

    When considering the quality of a voting system, you want voters to be honest (i.e. not strategic in their votes). Voters should pick the candidate they agree with, not the candidates they think they must support to avoid a catastrophe.

    Read more here.