The Oregon Legislature on Sunday's final day of the session passed House Bill 2004, which puts a proposal to move to ranked choice voting for federal and statewide races on the statewide ballot in November 2024.
Obligatory note: Ranked Choice Voting is a specific winner-selection method for ranked ballots. And that’s important because of this detail:
“House Bill 2004 would make sure people in power are elected by a true 50% majority.”
But only 50%.
If there’s another candidate that 60% of people like - they can lose. In fact, a candidate who is everyone’s second choice will lose immediately. They’ll be thrown out before one-vote nobodies. Because RCV only counts the top vote, per ballot, at any given time.
This is a merely okay use of ranked ballots, because it was originally for multi-winner elections, like a parliament. It’d be ideal for state and federal House elections. Proportional representation, no districts required.
It still beats the pants off of what we’re doing now. But most things would.
The fancy use of ranked ballots is a Condorcet method like Ranked Pairs. The winner is whoever 1v1s every other candidate. This is how people innately expect ranked ballots to work, and most alternatives are judged on whether they select the Condorcet winner anyway. All that matters is A-vs-B comparisons. If you put Special Favorite ahead of Tolerable Mainstream, the count doesn’t care if you put the entire cast of Frasier in-between them, and Mickey Mouse in first place. There are no rounds. There is no concept of “top vote.” Either SF > TM votes outnumber TM > SF votes, or they don’t.
RCV and Ranked Pairs are asking two different questions. RCV finds the first winner: whichever candidate can scrounge together 50%. Ranked Pairs finds the best candidate. Ranked Pairs tests for “it shoulda been.” If any runoff could have beaten RCV’s first winner, Ranked Pairs finds that instead. There are cases to be made for a strong base over a wide base, but quite frankly, democracy is about satisfying the most people, not making the simple majority happy at the expense of everyone else.
… there’s also this thing called Approval Voting, where you check as many names as you like and whoever gets the most votes wins. That’s it. That’s the whole thing. It matches Condorcet results, somehow, and uses the exact same ballots we use now. There is no good reason we’re not doing it everywhere.
Obligatory note: Ranked Choice Voting is a specific winner-selection method for ranked ballots. And that’s important because of this detail:
But only 50%.
If there’s another candidate that 60% of people like - they can lose. In fact, a candidate who is everyone’s second choice will lose immediately. They’ll be thrown out before one-vote nobodies. Because RCV only counts the top vote, per ballot, at any given time.
This is a merely okay use of ranked ballots, because it was originally for multi-winner elections, like a parliament. It’d be ideal for state and federal House elections. Proportional representation, no districts required.
It still beats the pants off of what we’re doing now. But most things would.
The fancy use of ranked ballots is a Condorcet method like Ranked Pairs. The winner is whoever 1v1s every other candidate. This is how people innately expect ranked ballots to work, and most alternatives are judged on whether they select the Condorcet winner anyway. All that matters is A-vs-B comparisons. If you put Special Favorite ahead of Tolerable Mainstream, the count doesn’t care if you put the entire cast of Frasier in-between them, and Mickey Mouse in first place. There are no rounds. There is no concept of “top vote.” Either SF > TM votes outnumber TM > SF votes, or they don’t.
RCV and Ranked Pairs are asking two different questions. RCV finds the first winner: whichever candidate can scrounge together 50%. Ranked Pairs finds the best candidate. Ranked Pairs tests for “it shoulda been.” If any runoff could have beaten RCV’s first winner, Ranked Pairs finds that instead. There are cases to be made for a strong base over a wide base, but quite frankly, democracy is about satisfying the most people, not making the simple majority happy at the expense of everyone else.
… there’s also this thing called Approval Voting, where you check as many names as you like and whoever gets the most votes wins. That’s it. That’s the whole thing. It matches Condorcet results, somehow, and uses the exact same ballots we use now. There is no good reason we’re not doing it everywhere.