More Proof that Ranked Choice Voting Doesn’t Work
According to its supporters, the main reason we should adopt ranked choice voting (RCV) is that it results in more moderate politicians. Well that argument was completely blown up in the RCV Democratic primary in New York City, which just chose Marxist, racist, antisemite Zohran Mamdani as its candidate for mayor.
About the author
Bob Zeidman is the creator of the field of software forensics and the founder of several successful high-tech Silicon Valley firms including Zeidman Consulting and Software Analysis and Forensic Engineering. His latest venture is Good Beat Poker, a new way to play and watch poker online. He is the author of textbooks on engineering and intellectual property as well as award-winning screenplays and novels. His latest book is Election Hacks, the true story of how he challenged his own beliefs about voting machine hacking in the 2020 presidential election and made international news and (possibly) $5 million.
"According to its supporters, the main reason we should adopt ranked choice voting (RCV) is that it results in more moderate politicians." But then we should conclude that the supporters of RCV are incorrect (if not duplicitous). I too oppose RCV.
By the way, polls show that in New York City, if they had used the traditional method of voting, Mamdani would still have won, because he has more support than any other single candidate. If you reject RCV because of the result, you should also reject the traditional voting method because it would have given the exact same result.
I do not endorse our current system, the plurality method or first-past-the-post (FPTP). The 2016 Republican presidential primary had 17 candidates. If support had been about equally split, any candidate could have won the election with the support of just 6% of the voters. That is hardly a resounding endorsement. Worse, the winner could be a person soundly rejected by most of the voters.
It is still helpful to know the second-place preferences, and so on, of the voters. That information should not be used in an instant runoff voting (IRV) method like RCV, which empowers the supporters of the most radical candidate. Rather, the information should be used in a single round of voting using positional voting, especially using a geometric method as discussed here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Positional_voting#Geometric
Such voting can be designed to minimize the effect of vote-splitting and teaming of candidates. This is what would empower centrist candidates, not RCV.