Rob Richie Makes a Renewed Plea for Ranked Choice Voting in Presidential General Elections

Long-time Ranked Choice Voter activist Rob Richie has this opinion piece urging the use of Ranked Choice Voting in U.S. presidential general elections.  He mentions the current efforts of Democratic Party leaders trying to restrict choices in the presidential election, as something destructive that would not be happening if the nation used RCV for president.


Comments

Rob Richie Makes a Renewed Plea for Ranked Choice Voting in Presidential General Elections — 32 Comments

  1. Alaska November 2022: all incumbents for the statewide races were re-elected.
    National as a whole November 2022: all the incumbents for US Senator were re-elected (f they were running for re-election), and only one Governor was defeated for re-election.

    RCV didn’t seem to make any difference in Alaska in November 2022.

  2. Anything which makes voting and vote counting more complicated and slower makes cheating easier, which is already way too easy as it is.

  3. RCV elected a commie to Congress in a red state. Hence, evil. Richard Winger is spreading propaganda. He has admitted to supporting rigged elections.

  4. PR – LEGIS AND APPROVAL VOTING – EXEC/JUDIC

    — PENDING CONDORCET [RCV DONE RIGHT] WITH APPV TIEBREAKER

  5. Has anyone ever thought of a way to represent actual condorcet voting on a ballot?

    Let’s suppose that there are four candidates for a position (A,B,C and D). Could you not recreate a matrix with each column headed by A,B,C,and D,and each row labeled A,B,C and D? Then, the voter could place an X in the row of A in column of their preference between A and the others? And so on, for the other candidates in each row?

    has this ever been done?

  6. WZ–

    CONDORCET USES SAME RCV DATA IN CORRECT MATH —

    ALL HEAD TO HEAD COMPARISONS.

    WOULD NEED A TIEBREAKER — YES/NO APPROVAL VOTING. —

    IN CASE OF CONDORCET *CIRCULAR TIES* —

    34 ABC
    33 BCA
    32 CAB

    IE — VOTE 1, 2, 3 AND YES/NO ON EACH CHOICE — DEFAULT IS NO

  7. Comrade Sucks,

    Comrade Z is not a bot, I don’t think, and even if he was, why are you so bigoted against other kinds of lifeforms and other languages? Like, that’s totally small d energy! Even if you have a small d, you can still have big D energy by being a big D Democrat!

  8. RETARDED BAN TROLL MATH MORONS CAN BARELY VOTE FOR 1 WITH AN *X*.

    MUCH LESS VOTE YES/NO AND 1,2,3 ETC. ON ALL CHOICES

  9. Comrade Question,

    I’m Karen. Please stop misgendering me. Don’t make me speak to Comrade Manager.

  10. Comrade manager: why are you platforming these mean trolls who are misgendering me, suggesting I have some ulterior motives, have the unspeakable nerve to suggest I might be trolling when clearly it is they who are trolling, gaslighting me, targeting me through gang stalking, and trying to snuff out my voice because I’m a wombperson, a minority, polyqueer, and a DNC?

    I demand to know who these evil trolls are, get a public apology, have their triggering and extremely offensive comments removed, and have them deplatformed. Like, right now right now.

    I’m the world’s most precious snowflake and I’m already blue, but I’m going to jump up and down, scream reeeeeeeeeeee, pound my fists, hold my breath and turn an even deeper shade of blue until my completely legit concerns are made the top priority here and resolved to my satisfaction.

    Thank you so much in advance for your prompt attention and help in this matter!

  11. Ranked choice voting, or even approval voting, would be an improvement over first-past-the-post – and honestly over any type of single-round, single-vote, single-winner voting.
    But a much bigger and less controversial improvement would be achieved by replacing the silly winner-takes-all system everywhere with the more sensible system of split electoral votes already used in Maine and Nebraska.

    Ideally of course, everyone comes to their senses and realizes that no “representative democracy” will ever be representative nor democratic. Next to anarchy – barring a theocracy directly under God – direct democracy is the next best long term solution.

  12. Democracy is bolshevism and the worst possible solution. Over time, people vote themselves the proceeds of other people’s labor, and more and more of the increasingly overtaxed job creators shirk and join the ranks of those with their hand out, increasingly aggressive in demanding that the wealth be shared until everyone is starving equally.

    On the social side, first acceptance and then adoption of lowest common denominator behaviors is the path of pure democracy.

    In foreign affairs, it’s easy for democracy to be manipulated so foreign enemies and their danger is widely seen as greater than it is, and those with an interest in a war, including the infotainment industrial complex among many others (money lenders, munitions manufacturers, etc, etc) have a vested interest in more wars.

    Pure democracy is the worst enemy of any minority – racial, religious, ethnic, cultural, the very poor, the very rich. The middle class can be screwed in ways that aren’t obvious – not just everything already mentioned, but entitlements, various government “services” that any competition is prohibited or taxed out of providing (roads, stadia, schools, libraries, parks, etc, etc).

    Controlled opposition factions can be set against each other to divide and conquer people.

    Every alternative to democracy has drawbacks as well.

    The best system has a lot of checks and balances, including against democracy, as US Founders frequently pointed out. The notion that we are or are supposed to be a democracy didn’t get widely taken up until WWI.

    It’s particularly counterintuitive to see a defender of anarchy, libertarianism, and/or theocracy shill for pure democracy.

    Particularly someone who says they read and largely agree with Hoppe’s “Democracy: the God that failed.” He doesn’t call for more democracy, or anything close to it, even as an interim or back up system, unless you count overthrowing absolute hereditary monarchs when they screw up.

    On the contrary, he points out all the drawbacks of democracy – short time horizons, etc.

    One doesn’t have to agree with Hoppe about going all the way to anarchy as being practical or wise to see these problems. Much less radical schools of libertarian ideology such as public choice theory lead to reasonable caution when it comes to excess democracy in a government.

    This is by no means an argument for tyranny – rather, for a limited constitutional republic, with all the original safeguards we had to keep it that way, and perhaps evolution in the opposite direction from the way it actually evolved over the past quarter millennium.

  13. Democracy is also easily manipulated to get people to give up freedom for safety, usually gradually. When it comes to guns, privacy, free speech, freedom of religion, freedom of the press, rights of criminal suspects, welfare, insurance, “public health”, “public education”, the “safety net,” drugs, regulations of all sorts, environmental issues, etc, etc, etc.

  14. And, it’s easy to manipulate voters with short time horizons to vote for high spending, high regulations, yet low taxes – at least, lower than all the “benefits,” do Goldstein, and alleged safety being paid for. Debt and inflation screw the people out of prosperity, but the benefits of perceived benefits come before the bill , so short time horizons of voters push them towards politicians promising something for nothing over time.

    When the bill comes due, scapegoating or ginning up a war or both are time tested solutions for politicians.

    Of course, the public is relentlessly propagandized, dumbed down, and accustomed to certain things being “normal” or necessary along the way.

    If that’s not enough, “newcomers” can be added to the rolls, more intelligent and productive people who think long term discourages from having children, and those dependent on government aid encouraged to have more.

    All these corrosive things happen faster when democracy is made more pure.

  15. Democracy is the worst system of government except for all the others that have been tried. Anarchy is not a system of government so does not factor into that equation – nor does obviously a theocracy directly under God.

    Your misunderstanding is to conceive of democracy purely as proportional representation i.e. a tyranny of the majority. That is a common misconception among self-proclaimed republicans who either don’t understand or don’t want to admit that a republicanism is also democratic. All that democracy means is rule by the people, nothing more, nothing less. It says nothing about how to weigh different opinions when settling disputes.

    An autocracy can counter-intuitively be more libertarian than a democracy, when a good ruler is in charge, e.g. Franco, Pinochet, Lukashenko. That is the position of, for example, Hans-Hermann Hoppe and Janusz Korwin-Mikke. But that is never a long-term solution, because sooner or later a bad ruler will become the autocrat, or a good rule be corrupted by power. You will notice that I was very precise and deliberate with my choice of words when I said: next to anarchy – barring a theocracy directly under God – direct democracy is the next best long term solution.

    Hoppe and Korwin-Mikke deal with such contingencies in slightly different ways:
    Hoppe’s solution is a type of small autocracies under a popular and powerful figure who is either elected or acclaimed, but who only rules with the consent of the ruled. Hoppe formulates this dynamic as a rescindable social contract: an agreement between the autocrat and their subject, and between the subjects themselves, that can be severed at any moment should the terms no longer be deemed agreeable by either party.

    Korwin-Mikke on the other hand, is a proponent of hereditary monarchy, arguing that the skills necessary to rule are taught from the cradle to the throne. And very few people not raised to be rulers, will ever make for suitable rulers. In the event of a bad ruler coming to power anyway, Korwin-Mikke does support the right of the ruled to rise up and overthrow such a ruler.

    There are arguments to be made for and against both, as well as many alternative models – which we can discuss, if you want – but the important thing to realize first and foremost, is that while Hoppe’s criticism of democracy is just, it is not as two-dimensional as you make it out to be, because democracy itself is not as two-dimensional as a tyranny of the majority.

  16. I agree with most, perhaps even all of what you said, by the way, if taken in regard to tyranny of the majority – what you called “a pure democracy”. But a limited constitutional republic is also democratic.

    And thus you may imagine, just like a tyranny of the majority/”pure democracy” can have the “people’s representatives” largely or completely eliminated in favor of referenda, so can a limited constitutional democracy.
    Certainly, it would be slightly more complex as a result of not simply counting the referenda and applying the majority decision without any regard for constitutional restrictions and protecting the interests of minorities. But in that sense, a republic is already more complex than a “pure democracy” – it has to be because of the checks and balances.

  17. REMINDER-

    STATE ROT SINCE 1776 — ALL STATE LEGIS AND MANY LOCAL GOVTS

    USA ROT SINCE 1789 — USA H REPS / SENATE / EC

    1/2 OR LESS VOTES X 1/2 RIGGED GERRYMANDER AREAS = 1/4 OR LESS CONTROL = OLIGARCHY

    SINCE 1888 – EXTREMIST PRIMARIES – EST. 5-12 PCT REAL MINORITY RULE

    PR
    APPV
    TOTSOP

  18. WITH A-L-L THE MAIN REGIMES IN THE USA BEING MINORITY RULE OLIGARCHIES. —

    NO SURPRISE EVEN WORSE DEGENERATE LAWLESS TYRANT MONARCH PREZS / STATE GUVS / LOCAL MAYORS

    AND TYRANT COURTS- ESP IF HACK JUDGES ARE APPOINTED BY EXEC TYRANTS.

    THUS THE NONSTOP ANNUAL GOVT DEFICITS AND ACCUMULATED DEBTS AND NONSTOP INFLATION –
    ESP SINCE 1929.

  19. Is ranked choice voting possible with write-in voting? How many write-ins can one rank? Why not weighted ranked choice write-in voting in which a voter assigns a “weight” to their ranked-choice? Like 100 points to their first choice, 50 points to their second choice and only 5 points to the third, etc.

  20. “With Americans fundamentally restless with their ballot choices…”

    That sounds like part of the American spirit to me.

    More options:
    -December runoff
    -Approval voting (so simple)
    -Easy ballot access (why we’re here… increases third party base, so major candidates will try to woo them like Trump did to the Libertarians)
    -Electors by district (the Nebraska/Maine thing)

  21. “Is ranked choice voting possible with write-in voting? How many write-ins can one rank? Why not weighted ranked choice write-in voting in which a voter assigns a “weight” to their ranked-choice? Like 100 points to their first choice, 50 points to their second choice and only 5 points to the third, etc.”

    What you are describing sounds like range voting. You would rank each candidate from 1 to x, x being the highest range. What typically happens under range voting is that partisans will almost always rank their guys x (the highest), and everyone else gets blank. The election ends up being decided by the voters who are not partisan, and take the time to actually value each candidate.

  22. All these schemes make voting more difficult and counterintuitive to figure out, vote counting more complicated and usually more time consuming, and fraud and vote manipulation easier.

    That includes Rcv, approval voting, range voting, etc.

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