Common Myths About Ranked Choice Voting Debunked

Recently, I wanted to link to a concise summary of the most popular RCV myths, and was surprised to find that there really isn’t a good one. So here’s my attempt at addressing all of the most common false claims in one place. Wait, what’s “Ranked Choice Voting”? To be clear, the system I’m talking about …

Some election simulation results

I need to stop being such a perfectionist and publish things I've done, even if they aren't as complete as I would like. Here are some: Merrill 1984 I've reproduced all the tables and figures from A Comparison of Efficiency of Multicandidate Electoral Systems using my own simulator written in Python, then added some modern …

Ranked-Choice Voting doesn’t fix the spoiler effect

In seemingly every discussion thread about American politics, the same conversation happens again and again: “Man, both political parties suck.” “Yeah, we really need a third party.” “But any third party entering the race acts as a spoiler, so nobody votes for them.” “That’s why we need Ranked Choice Voting! It eliminates the spoiler effect …

How Ranked-Choice Voting elects right-wing candidates in left-wing districts

It looks like Instant-Runoff Voting, a type of ranked-choice voting, is going to be on the ballot in NYC. Unfortunately, IRV is a poorly-designed plurality-runoff system, which works fine when there are only one or two strong candidates, but can fail whenever there are three or more, causing it to elect unrepresentative candidates. Here’s an …

Majority rule rejected by a majority

When discussing voting method reform, we often talk about concepts like the majority criterion, which requires that “If one candidate is ranked first by a majority (more than 50%) of voters, then that candidate must win”. This seems like an obviously desirable quality, if you grew up with “democracy” being treated as a synonym for …

How Ranked-Choice Voting elects extremists

Instant-Runoff Voting is a voting method where voters rank candidates, who are then eliminated in a series of simulated runoff elections. It’s also known as “Ranked-Choice Voting” in the US, “Preferential Voting” in Australia, and “The Alternative Vote” in the UK (though there are many other preferential/ranked-choice voting systems, so I’ll use “IRV” here to …