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RANKEDCHOICE

                                                            June 29, 2021


Okay, it seems like for ages now the online left
has been convinced that the key to it's success is
to get away from winner-take-all elections and
switch to something like ranked-choice elections.

I've seen these in use for many years in San Francisco
and now California, and I keep trying to explain
it doesn't work that way.  Now once again, we're
seeing the left beaten by the not-so-left in the
New York Mayor's race, so let me try again:


   Ranked-choice ballots-- where you go
   through a list of candidates and number
   them in order of your preference I
   first heard called "Instant Runoff Voting"
   when it was introduced in San Francisco.

   That no doubt made some sense to people
   in SF because SF already had provisions
   to do "runoff" elections if no candidate
   had a majority, and we'd just been
   through one of them: it was an expensive
   annoyance, so doing an "instant"
   simulated runoff after just voting once
   made a lot of sense.

   It has also always seemed to me that
   "Instant Runoff" is an *excellent* name
   to sell people on the idea: it sounds
   like some new kind of lottery ticket.


Ranked-choice/IRV is indeed an improvement because it
completely eliminates those inane arguments about whether
you're wasting you're vote if you vote for anyone besides
the leading candidates.

You can get much closer to just "voting your
conscience" using a ranked-choice ballot--
there are some obscure circumstances where              My man-- when he's not
you might be plunged back into "gaming" your            spinning for Israel--
vote and so on, but as they (meaning Kenneth            David Leonhardt wrote
Arrow) said, "nothing's perfect".                       up a "guide to ranked
                                                        choice voting":
If you expect anyone to win except the
mainstream/centrists you don't                          https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/16/briefing/a-guide-to-ranked-choice-voting.html
understand much about politics.  Your
conscience can't steer you toward a
candidate you haven't heard about, and
if you're not a politics freak (as most
people are not) the candidates you hear
about are not concidentally the ones
favored by Money.



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