Scorecard: Ranked Choice Voting
This post on Best Of A Great Lot is a part of a series on the subject of designing a new form of governance. Each piece aims to stand alone, but fits together on the Table of Contents.
This is a scorecard for Ranked Choice Voting (RCV). Scorecards are meant to be a shorthand summation of the arguments for and against. RCV, using various voting methods and algorithms, is commonly proposed as a significant reform to our system. I don’t see it as enough of an improvement to be worth the effort we’ve put into it, so I don’t plan on diving into it beyond this scorecard. Scores out of 5. Arrows compare to Presidential Democracy.
% of citizens who have a representative they prefer: ↑3/51
Representatives accountable to the people: ↑3/52
Bundled Governance: No Change
Justifiable Governance: No Change
Dilution of Representation: No Change
Independence of Evaluation: No Change
Effectiveness of Governance: No Change
Legitimacy of Governance: ↑3.5/53
Self-governance: No Change
I don’t expect that RCV will make a huge difference in the percentage of people who have a representative they prefer. In part this is because I expect the field of possible candidates to continue to be pretty narrow, and so while RCV will allow people to vote for their preferred third party candidate, and not have that act as a spoiler against the candidate they don’t really love, the winner-takes-all nature of races under RCV will still prevent the real preferred candidate for many (the third-party candidate) from getting anything. Perhaps if we phrased this question as “more people are less unhappy with the outcome” I would agree with it wholeheartedly. That seems like a poor goal.
This is certainly debatable. Perhaps we’ll continue to be disappointed with our representatives, but unable to field seriously better candidates simply because we can’t even tell what a good candidate would look like when they are running. Perhaps the result will be so many people running that we tune out and just let the newspaper tell us who to vote for. But it is possible that allowing more candidates to run means we will have more opportunities to exert accountability by firing representatives when we’re disappointed with them.
The majority would certainly prefer not to see the candidate they think they deserve being taken away by a spoiler candidate. This improves legitimacy a bit.