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Would ranked choice voting help this? Genuine question looking for opinions. I tend to think it would, but that might be too optimistic with politics the way it is these days.
Yes, yes it would.
The way ranked choice works is that everyone’s first rank is tabulated.
If a candidate gets the majority vote in the first choices they win outright.
If not, the candidates with the fewest first choice is eliminated, and those that voted for them, they move on to their second choice picks.
Votes are now recounted. If no one still has a clear majority, the person with the lowest votes is again eliminated, with their voter’s votes going to the next rank in choosing.
You go through that until someone gets a majority.
Other similar systems include STAR voting, Score Voting, and Approval Voting.
I mean... none of that actually helps a third party at the presidential level. Or even addresses spoilers. Going to address your points out of order to make my own
So... the third party candidates get eliminated in the first round. Because they cannot compete with the two big parties in terms of campaign funding. Assuming it doesn't end in the first round because...
So the republican wins because there is one right wing fascist running against a dozen flavors of Left wing. Or the Democrat wins because all the third parties were a negligible percentage of the vote to begin with.
I HAVE seen proposals that change the ordering so that a third party "can't" be a spoiler (I forget the specifics but basically it is removing the small percentage votes first and only comparing once you downselect to N candidates where N is usually 2) but...
People confuse the idea of making a third party candidate viable with minimizing how much you are pissing away your vote by voting for a third party in the presidential election. Ranked choice is great for the latter but it still has many of the same spoiler problems without additional changes. And, arguably, would increase the impact of third party spoilers if one party over-splits. I continue to point people toward the mess in France where basically all the Left wing parties had to unite and make a coalition to MAYBE stop the right wing fascists.
Personally? I would much rather we abolish the electoral college and just do a popular vote. That will have a MUCH bigger impact on third party candidates because it suddenly becomes viable to run a national campaign where you convince maybe 15% of the overall populace rather than needing 40% of each county just to end up on the politico map. Because the latter is what really screws over third parties at the presidential level because they just don't have the money or resources to sway enough counties to get any meaningful electoral college votes. And ranked choice alone has no impact on that.
Yes, anything other than first past the post would help. Ranked choice, instant runoff, however you want to define it.
It would allow people to vote for a 3rd party without disenfranchising themselves.
Until then...
Yes, though it’s not a magic bullet.
Here’s a video that compares Plurality/FPTP (our current system), Ranked choice, and approval voting, and is up-front about the limitations of each method.
Here’s a link with a lot more information on different voting methods. STAR voting is the method highlighted here as the best, but Score voting and Approval are also pretty good. IRV/Ranked Choice doesn’t perform quite as well, but is at least still better than FPTP.
A new voting system that’s any better than our current system brings us closer to a political landscape where viable candidates who choose not to drop out early aren’t working against their interests, and voters are less incentivized to vote strategically. And even if IRV is only marginally better than FPTP, its popularity gives exposure to the idea that alternative voting systems are worth looking into.
For the time being, it would effectively move fringe-party votes to the nearest major party - ensuring that e.g. Trump doesnt win if the majority of people had Harris or some third party candidate ranked above Trump.
Current “third” parties have a long way to go before they would end up in the winning slot - but, presuming the elimination rounds’ stats are published and not just the final winner, we could better gauge the support for them since voters could show preference for them on the ballot without “wasting their vote”.
After a while, evidence of sustained support may snowball, or a particularly compelling candidate may be ranked above a “major” party candidate on a majority of ballots - leading to a win.
Approval voting would help, but neither party will ever vote in favor of it.
Yes, yes, a thousand times yes.
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It's on the ballot statewide in six states so far, and it's already in action in a bunch of places. Almost everybody who isn't a malicious establishment politician likes it wherever it gets tried. Read the sticky post to learn more.
It depends how you look at it.
Ranked Choice is not going to make a third party viable at the presidential level. Simply because the other two parties have orders of magnitude more funding to campaign and make sure people know and "like" their candidates. And, depending on the implementation of ranked choice, it may still result in splitting the vote.
At the congressional representative level? Ranked choice has a lot of benefits there. But that is also the level where third party candidates are still viable under the current model.
The reality is that most of the things people want out of ranked choice we already have out of the primary system. Wide range of candidates run in the primary on each side. Primaries exist to figure out who The People like and to let the party down select. Done right, you have what would otherwise have been "third party" candidates who suddenly have a LOT of influence within the party (see: Bernie Sanders in 2020... less so in 2016) because they get a lot of influence on the platform in exchange for supporting the candidate who has the majority of the vote and the party backing.
The key is that people need to understand they are still compromising to get some of what they want AND to engage with their local (and even national) parties to make sure their voices are heard.