• chaogomu@lemmy.world
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    2 months ago

    Ranked Choice has a Monotonicity problem. i.e. it’s possible for a candidate to lose if a more people rank that candidate higher on their own ballot without changing any other ballots.

    This has happened in recent RCV elections, and resulted in the candidate’s ideological opposition winning.

    There’s a group called FairVote that’s been pushing RCV since the early 90s despite the many flaws of the system. Flaws that have been known since the system was first designed in 1788.

    Seriously, Instant Runoff Voting was invented by the Marquis de Condorcet in 1788 as an example of a broken election system that can eliminate candidates preferred by a majority of voters.

    It was later reinvented in the late 1850s by an Englishman who presumably never learned French.

    Anyway a modern voting system for consideration is STAR, it was developed in 2014 by people who have read Condorcet, the the works of Kenneth Arrow from the 1950s. (Arrow’s Impossibility Theorium)

    Find more info at www.equal.vote

    • Tenderizer@aussie.zone
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      2 months ago

      IIRC it’s been mathematically proven that no single-member electoral system can be perfect. If it wins in one area it fails in another.

      My preferred system is to use a standard ranked ballot, count it using IRV until every candidate has above 20% and then switch to ranked pairs (so there are no spoilers, but the daylight savings party doesn’t end up winning by default).

      • chaogomu@lemmy.world
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        2 months ago

        Yeah, just avoid IRV completely.

        Also, the thing you’re likely thinking of is Arrow’s Impossibility Theorem, which only really applies to Ordinal (Ranked) systems. Cardinal (Rated) systems don’t suffer from the failings of Arrow’s Theorem.

        I’m not really a fan of the multi-member district, I’d rather just shrink the size of the district until they are more homogonous, and then just send one rep from dozens or hundreds more districts.

        Local democracy is more democratic after all.