In ranked-choice voting, a candidate needs more than 50 percent of the vote to be declared the winner outright. If the front-runner doesn’t have that percentage of the vote, the candidate with the fewest votes that round drops off the ballot, and those who ranked that candidate first will have their votes go to their second choice. The process continues until a candidate has more than 50 percent of the vote.
The state’s special House race election will be the only race with ranked-choice voting on Tuesday, but it will provide a preview of how other candidates running in races such as the state’s Senate election will do in November.
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If your first choice doesn't win, and there are only two real options, what difference would it make if it weren't ranked choice?
Its a way to force people to vote for someone they didnt want. It forces votes from lower candidates to the top. Imagine in the NFL if come playoff time they took the wins from the worst team and added those.to the tally for the top team.
Also to add. Dems can flood the field with their candidates. Add in 2-3 RINOS and now We the People have 25%chance of winning instead of 50%
I find that the explanation provided in the original post isn't detailed enough, or else I'd use it to address your concerns.
I'll address the flooding issue as I don't follow the NFL analogy. Even if there were a bunch of RINOs, the conservatives would still vote for your preferred Republican candidate before the Democrat, so sooner or later that R would edge out 51% of the vote before the D (assuming they should have won the race). For example if the D gets 40% of the vote, and six of the R candidates get 10%, eventually the R's would take it 60-40 (assuming the R voters voted all R down the ticket), the most popular of whom would take the seat.
I actually think ranked choice is better in this situation for you, because some people might be nervous about running the "we the people" candidate against the Democrat instead of a "safe" RINO. With this system you would see the true support behind each candidate at the first stage.
Here's a random youtube vid that explains it a bit better https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8Z2fRPRkWvY
You should watch the recent Veritas expose of how the Murkowski schemed the rank voting system in Alaska. She knows as well as anyone in power that ranked voting favors the incumbent.
Yep! And the Judge her father appointed made sure she stayed in!
Thanks, watched it. It's a shame that the ranked choice system is only being introduced because it benefits the person bringing it forward, but it doesn't mean that it's not superior, and a step to move away from the two-party system in place.
If we put aside your feelings about specific candidates and look at it from a general point of view..
Three candidates: A, B, C
40% support A, 35% support B and 25% support C
Of the 25% that support C, 20% support B and 5% support A.
Who should win the race? A because they have the initial majority? Or B because they have broader general support?
I favor B.
Not true in my own personal observation. Where I live, the dems had two candidates, republicans had four, undeclared had 2, and third party each had 1 (Green party and I can't remember).
Vote scoring took 5 or 6 rounds to declare a winner - it came down to 1 of the dems (incumbent) vs. most notable republican on ballot (former mayor). Dem won by 34 votes in a town of around 70,000 registered voters. Republican candidate was leading each round until the last when one of the third party candidates got eliminated.
I can see things getting iffy when it needs to go that far to get to a winner. An extreme example would be if candidate A got 49% of the initial vote, but didn't get their name on any other ballots and the winner was B who only had, say, 10% of the first-choice votes.
Then again, in this scenario, candidate A would have been extremely unpopular with 51% of of the population.
One thing you can definitively say from your own observed result is that the former mayor didn't have support of more than 50% of the voters, whereas the incumbent did (even if the voters were less inclined to put their support behind him/her)