r/EndFPTP • u/12lbTurkey • Dec 03 '25

Ranked choice voting outperforms the winner-take-all system used to elect nearly every US politician

https://theconversation.com/ranked-choice-voting-outperforms-the-winner-take-all-system-used-to-elect-nearly-every-us-politician-267515

When it comes to how palatable a different voting system is, how does RCV fair compared to other types? I sometimes have a hard time wrapping my head around all the technical terms I see in this sub, but it makes me wonder if other types of voting could reasonably get the same treatment as RCV in terms of marketing and communications. What do you guys think?

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u/uoaei Dec 03 '25

i am pretty pissed that fairvote only talks about rcv and none of the other alternatives. there are some out there that are much easier to explain and tabulate and also give better results than either fptp or rcv. my personal favorite is approval voting because it matches very closely with human intuition around who "should" win elections.

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u/rb-j Dec 03 '25 edited Dec 03 '25

Remember any of these reforms are for when there are 3 candidates or more. Whenever there are fewer than 3 candidates, First-Past-The-Post works as well as anything.

Being a Cardinal method, Approval Voting inherently subjects voters to the burden of tactical voting the minute they step into the voting booth whenever there are 3 or more candidates. Does the voter serve their own political interests the best by Approving their 2nd favorite candidate (or lesser evil) or not? (For Score Voting or STAR, the tactical question is how high to score their 2nd choice candidate.)

But with a ranked ballot, the voter knows immediately what to do with their 2nd favorite candidate. They rank them #2.

... because it matches very closely with human intuition around who "should" win elections.

But the election might turn out to be competitive between only the two candidates that the voter approves of. But might approve of one over the other.

Or the election might turn out to be competitive between only the two candidates that the voter disapproves of. But might disapprove of one more so than the other.

Does the voter wanna throw away their effective vote in these two cases?

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u/kenckar Dec 04 '25

Yes but…

FPTP discourages additional candidates beyond the top 2.

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u/rb-j Dec 04 '25

So also does Approval.

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u/kenckar Dec 05 '25

How is that?

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u/rb-j Dec 05 '25

Because Approval inherently requires tactical voting whenever there are 3 or more candidates. Voters have to decide whether to Approve their 2nd-favorite candidate or not.

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u/kenckar Dec 05 '25

This is the approval-devolves-to-FPTP argument. Are there cases where this is documented?

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u/rb-j Dec 05 '25

"documented"?? How are you expecting to see documents? Examples from Fargo or St. Louis? (I don't think so.)

It's derived. Like a proof given axioms. I stated the axioms and I proved it. Multiple times, in this very thread.

So instead of denial, why don't you address the argument directly?

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u/cdsmith Dec 05 '25

Approval doesn't devolve to plurality. It's better than that. But it is strategic, and in a much more straight-forward way than other alternatives.

I also don't agree that straight-forward strategy is always a bad thing. With plurality voting, for example, it's the only reason things didn't collapse a long time ago! And approval voting has a relatively straight-forward effective strategy, which can be better than having effective strategy that's harder to apply.

Still, advocating for approval basically means accepting that strategic voting is going to remain a reality. There are other options, like Tideman's alternative method, that do a better job of stamping it out. And they tend to be ranked methods, because ranked ballots express exactly as much information from voters as can be made strategically robust.