Ranked choice voting is the fact of life in Alaska now. In my opinion the system was created to help Lisa Mussorgsky win elections in the state. Lisa M usually doesn’t get the Republican nomination though she describes herself as a Republican. She runs as an independent. Ranked choice voting allows Democrats to vote for her first and their own Democrat candidate second while Republicans vote for their nominee first and Lisa second, and between the two Lisa Mussorgsky wins the election (in theory).
A voter may tolerate just one choice and hate all the rest. Ranked choice voting forces bad, capricious choice voting. If there is one good surgeon in a hospital H.M.O. and the remainder are drunks and dopers, and patients need elect one surgeon to work that day at the hospital yet most patients are ill-informed of surgeon quality, how is the well-informed voter to rank all of the dopers and drunks knowing they should all be condemned? Failing to make the secondary votes can harm the opportunity for the one good flesh-cutter to serve.
Ranked choice voting makes the election process opaque rather than transparent. Few voters understand how second third and fourth place choices contribute votes for candidates if their first choice doesn’t win or if votes from others put someone over the top. Smarmy advocates for ranked choice voting denigrate opponents saying that the process is childishly simple and that anyone can understand it. That is simply false. It is easy to understand how to work ranked choice voting and rank non-choice choices for particular candidates in an order. What isn’t understood is how the votes are counted or added up to elect a winner.
One wonders why voters should be forced to indicate support for candidates they may not like at all and wouldn’t vote for in any circumstance I order to avoid default support in some kind of obscure second and third choice tier voting tabulation that defaults to those that did rank choices having more election power if one chooses not to rank alternative choices. Let me give and example.
In the 2024 Presidential election there are no good candidates. A voter may believe all of the candidates are idiots, unqualified and will do a bad job at leading the nation. None will eliminate national economic methods that cause global warming or deterioration of the ecosphere with an ongoing mass extinction of life on Earth, none will balance the federal budget and none have expressed- beside Donald Trump, a plain intention and ability to swiftly end the war in Ukraine and Russia (Ukraine is attacking Russia with missiles and drones now). No candidate has a plan to eliminate poverty, create a national minimum income for all Americans, most don’t have a plan to secure the southern border against illegal migration or increase the taxes on the rich significantly. So a voter sees one candidate that might, marginally be acceptable and males a choice to vote for that candidate, then if ranked choice voting existed the voter would be forced to indirectly vote for several others to fill the second through fifth place spots and they are all reprehensible to the voter.
So the voter gets to the polling booth and begins selecting candidates they hate as ranked choices for slots two through five. I stipulate that an Americans Communist Party candidate, an American Nazi Party candidate, an American Jihad against America candidate, an American anarchist party candidate and several other reformers are in the election. So the candidate picks Ron DeSantis for first place and then faces the challenge of how to vote for the others in order not to water-down their own first choice vote by not voting for the also rans. That is the problem with ranked choice voting. Another issue is how ones ranked secondary choices might help elect some other candidate one hates, and maybe everyone hates, because no one ranked them first and placed them in second because the others were worse.
You go to a restaurant and rank your choices from a menu for what you might get. Everyone in the restaurant is also voting an five menu selections for what they might get. The one with the most first place votes might not actually be what everyone gets. If there are two reasonable choices on the menu and three bad ones that everyone hates, yet half of the people in the restaurant would never tolerate the other treasonable choice it seems possible that one of the reprehensible third through fifth place choices may win the election if they are everyone’s second choice. If the first place votes were tied between the two candidates from the rhubarb and broccoli parties the third party knockwurst party could take the cake; that can’t be certain since the tallying process for ranked choice voting is Byzantine bull.
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