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this post was submitted on 17 Aug 2023
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I would need to see the ballot to say for sure, but the article lists this example:
"The lawsuit notes that in elections for at-large seats on the DC city council — where voters can currently choose two candidates — voters in Wards 7 and 8 are less likely to cast a second vote, a phenomenon known as "undervoting.""
So, when presented with a relatively simple "Vote For Two" choice, Ward 7 and 8 are less likely to vote for a second person.
If that's a problem, then the idea of not only voting for multiple people, but ranking them 1-2-3, may be a big issue.
Remember, back in 2000 Florida voters struggled with the butterfly ballot.
But in the end, this could be solved by a combination of education, clear instructions, and an easy to understand ballot design.
But undervoting isn't really a problem. No one is being disenfranchised by not casting a second vote (or ranking all options), they just aren't availing themselves of the full range of options. Even just voting for one person could be an intentional choice if you don't really care about the other options or want your first choice to have a better chance of winning an expected head-to-head.
This is at worst an indicator the government should run some informational campaigns, not a reason not to use multi-voting systems.
If it’s intentional by the voter it’s not a problem.
If it’s because the ballots are confusing, or the process is, it isn’t fine. They’re being partially disenfranchised- their ballot will have less power than someone who understood the process.
We have RCV in NY for primaries. Understanding the implications of how the order matters and gets counted isn’t super easy. There are definitely going to be unintended consequences for RCV.
It's not really any more disenfranchising than FPTP. While RCV has tactical voting issues, so does FPTP, and in most cases someone who doesn't understand the system is just going to vote for someone they perceive to have a chance of winning, which is very likely to be in the final two candidates. And if they're instead the type to vote for a minor candidate, their vote would have just been meaningless in FPTP anyway.
All the trivia about the very rare cases where tactical voting matters in RCV is just that, trivia. No one really needs to try to game theory their vote out, because in most cases it just doesn't matter and RCV just gives some people the ability to first declare who they actually want before sending their vote to the preferred major candidate. And in the end, people who can't figure out basic voting instructions simply aren't thinking about their vote that deeply. We're lucky if they've even familiarized themselves with all the candidates.
It's really hard for any system to be worse than FPTP. The people spreading FUD about RCV are mostly doing it because the flaws in FPTP benefit them.
It does because their vote is potentially worth less than someone who does understand.
That’s less of an issue in FPTP except for the undervoting issue called out in the post when you have to vote for multiple candidates.
Anyone who votes for a third party candidate gets no value from their vote in FPTP. They have effectively no impact on the outcome at all. This is no worse than that and not in any way a reason not to implement RCV.
And again, this is the slimmest of edge cases for a sliver of voters. Most voters will easily adapt to the system (particularly if any effort at all is made to educate them) and even those that don't will very rarely lose their vote due to not ranking lower candidates. And those voters that would are already throwing away their vote without impacting the result in FPTP. That this is a real issue that should block RCV implementation because it's in the interest of voting fairness is A LIE.
It's hard for a system to be worse than FPTP.
The problem is that RCV isn't that big of an improvement on it.
For one thing, its voter satisfaction efficiency isn't great.
For another thing, in most FPTP elections, things like the spoiler effect are mere trivia, as well. The last time I voted, nearly all the races had at most two candidates and a few local ones even only had one candidate. I'm not a fan of FPTP because it leads to elections like that and handles elections with many viable candidates badly. However, it's in precisely the kind of elections I care about that RCV's flaws go from mere trivia to being far more likely.
A good voting system shouldn't need a crutch like primaries to have a high quality result. You should be able to have an election between all the 2016 presidential primary candidates without the chance of weird non-monotonic behavior being unacceptably high.
What about the disenfranchised caused by first past the post? It’s arguably more representative even if some are partially disenfranchised.
I'd be interested to see the instructions on those ballots that had this problem. Since states are in charge of their own voting systems we can't really have a standardized system, but I'm sure the clarity can be improved.
I get this in theory but it gave me the hilarious mental image of someone gathering their phone, keys, wallet, going to their local polling station, showing their ID, walking to the voting machine, then thinking, "Oh no, I'm allowed to vote for TWO people?" and immediately bolting out the door.
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It's a design and execution problem, not a voter problem. The Florida ballots had a stupid design that met the needs of a counting machine, not the needs of voters
Pretty sure it was less about the machine snd more about intentionally confusing older voters to pull votes from Gore and add them to Buchanan...
Maybe the second candidate was s*** and nobody wanted to vote for them? Or maybe voters really only wanted the one person.
Or, and I think this is more likely, people are used to the idea of marking more than one name invalidating the ballot.
You think that's more likely huh? But somehow only in those two heavily minority districts? What are you basing that on?
I don't think it's just in those minority districts. The article states that it's WORSE in those districts, that doesn't mean it's not a problem elsewhere.
Maybe they need to put "Vote for Two" in bold or a bigger font or something. Like I said at the top, it's hard to tell without seeing the ballot design.