In 2011 a Mayoral race was held in San Francisco. Sixteen candidates were on the ballot. The ballot was designed under Rank Choice Voting. San Fran employs RCV. There is only one problem. Voters can only 'rank' three candidates.
The ballot is set into three columns. All sixteen listed in each column. Voters must 'rank' according to each column. One choice each! Your 1st, 2nd and 3rd choice. (yes, you are voting multiple times) according to 'preference'. If you mark it wrong your ballot is tossed.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SlyL1SEiCLQ
What is wrong here is that there are 16 candidates but you only get to choose three. Under RCV there should be sixteen rankings. Right?
In Cambridge Mass the City Council uses RCV for elections. Cambridge is a staunch Democrat controlled city. So what is it we see in this city? What party controls San Fran?
In both places there exists a system of voting that ensures a Democrat hegemony.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XTpfHd5BaBE
Can you imagine any Republican running in any of these places? Imagine a Libertarian. Under RCV they would be instanty tossed out due to dismal numbers (but thank you for your rankings).
The theory behind Rank Choice Voting is not at all sound. Frederic Bastiat wrote about such social theories. He premised that (unlike) scientific theories based on trial and error, Social theories are just employed. The outcome being the least of the theorist's concern.
RCV claims to being a better form of voting are far from it. It is fraught with errors as much as the current system it wants to replace. This is Kenneth Arrow's Impossibility Theorem.
The theorem is named after economist and Nobel laureate Kenneth Arrow, who demonstrated the theorem in his doctoral thesis and popularized it in his 1951 book Social Choice and Individual Values. The original paper was titled "A Difficulty in the Concept of Social Welfare".[1]
In social choice theory, Arrow's impossibility theorem, the general possibility theorem or Arrow's paradox is an impossibility theorem stating that when voters have three or more distinct alternatives (options), no ranked voting electoral system can convert the ranked preferences of individuals into a community-wide (complete and transitive) ranking while also meeting a specified set of criteria: /wiki/Unrestricted_domain
From Wikipedia,
That set of criteria is selecting a winner. Not ranking. Essentially you ARE voting multiple times. RCV supporters have told me many times that I am wrong on this premise.
According to Arrow (and what I have posited as well) you are 'manufacturing' the winner by a shell game. The magical 50% you need to win is completely arbitrary. Besides, 50% isn't a majority. It is only half. In a multi candidate race no one is going to get 50% unless they run one hell of a campaign. In the case of Fall River only 13,000 total votes were cast amongst six candidates. The Mayor he won by 35%.
In fact RCV does not even pass Occam's second Razor. Occam said that if there is to be something set forth as fact it must be proven empirically. In addition any deviations, questions or secondary statements of facts must also be meticulously proven. No one from RCV even attempts this. It is just claimed to be better. Politicians who sign onto this shell game use the same script from the various RCV websites. Almost like they are handed to them to repeat.
Two articles come to mind. A March 29th 2019 article on WBUR.org and a March 14th article in Worcester Magazine. Both use the same wording, phrases and misinformation.
https://www.wbur.org/cognoscenti/2019/03/21/ranked-choice-voting-mac-dalessandro?fbclid=IwAR2UsK9z6SlsMU8xSR1UBhFB448Cq7CG9bS1d3zw2_7kEFy7VhvbDZ-lvr0
The WBUR article lists several cities that have been using RCV for a number of years.
Massachusetts wouldn’t be taking a leap of faith if voters adopted ranked-choice voting. Almost 4 million Americans live in communities that use this system, including Oakland, California; Minneapolis and St. Paul, Minnesota; and Santa Fe, New Mexico. Closer to home, voters in Cambridge have used a variation of ranked-choice voting for city council and school board elections since 1941.
What is NOT divulged is that those cities have a Democrat hegemony. Cambridge Mass being the worst of them all. Cambridge has been under Democrat control since 1941. RCV loves to tout how Maine has adopted RCV. Maine has shot themselves in the foot with RCV. All the economic gains and welfare reforms from the last Republican Administration have been wiped out. Maine is on course to the tax and spend policy that messed it up in the first place
Nothing is necessarily wrong with that; the decision process can be perfectly democratic, and one person simply turns out to be on the winning side on all issues. (Hylland 1986: 51, footnote 10)
Aanund Hylland
My grandfather used to say, " Everyone one has a Democratic right to be an ass.
Hylland's premise is correct. It is all perfectly Democratic if all you have is one party in power winning on all sides of the issues.
If we further explore Arrow's Theorem we come to realize that RCV isn't choosing better candidates or choosing a better system. It chooses from best to worst.
There are some people whose preferences will inform this choice, and the question is: which procedures are there for deriving, from what is known or can be found out about their preferences, a collective or "social" ordering of the alternatives from better to worse?
Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
In plurality voting voters choose the best person to win. the best candidates rise to the top through meritocracy. They earn your vote. The Primary process literally weeds out the least effective campaigns. I do not suggest that candidates who fall by the wayside are 'bad' candidates. It is just the nature of the process. Elections are very passionate endeavors. People really do vote with their hearts most of the time if the 2016 Presidential race is any indicator.
Intuitively, the result has to be a ranking of the alternatives from better to worse, perhaps with ties. There is never to be a cycle of social preferences, like the one derived by pairwise majority decision in the paradox of voting
Basically, you choose the candidate you want to win first. From then on your second and third choices are simply that. Your second and third choice. I really want a steak but I will settle for the pork? If I don't get the pork I guess I am ok with the chicken? Is this how elections should be decided?
The WBUR article makes this completely inacurate statement, If ranked-choice voting were in place in Fall River, where no candidate had a majority, it would have allowed the votes for Erica Scott-Pacheco, who received just 5 percent of the vote, to transfer to voters' second choice. This would have continued until one candidate surpassed 50 percent. That would probably have been one of Correia’s opponents, based on the recall vote. The wishes of 62 percent of the people would have been satisfied, instead of subverted by the "pick one" plurality voting system.
Only 13,000 votes were cast! How can ranking the votes from candidates who received even less votes somehow reflect the "... the wishes of 62% of the people.."? Fall River has 190,000 people living there.
Now, unless you are using Common Core math Rank Choice Voting should make perfect sense. Pick an arbitrary 50% to achieve and by voting multiple times rank your choices from best to worse until the second, third place loser becomes the actual winner. Stack up the field with multiple candidates that would have otherwise been eliminated in the Primary process. Be sure to limit how many you can rank (like San Fran) the whole time convincing the voters you are opening up the process to let better candidates run better races while deluding them into thinking they have better choices.
....And That Is The Diatribe....
Be sure to check out the next segment on dollar numbers and who is funding Rank Choice Voting
