# Welcome to the Ranked Choice Voting Community! Voting is broken! Let’s fix it.
Ranked Choice Voting (RCV) is a voting system in which voters rank candidates by
preference on their ballots. If a candidate wins a majority of first-preference
votes, they are declared the winner. If no candidate wins a majority, the
candidate with the fewest votes is eliminated, and votes for that candidate are
redistributed to the remaining candidates, based on the next preference on each
ballot. This process continues until one candidate has a majority. Learn more
about how it works.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ranked-choice_voting_in_the_United_States] ## Why
Ranked Choice Voting? - Prevents the tyranny of the middle - Encourages
diversity of candidates - Discourages negative campaigning - Provides more
choice for voters - Saves money by avoiding runoff elections ## Community Rules
1. Respect each other’s opinions. 2. No misinformation. All claims must be
backed by credible sources. 3. Be proactive and informative. ## Sister
Communities - FairVote Canada [
[email protected]] - Make one for your country!
Why not acceptance/range voting?
Anything is better than what we’ve got. Unifying around one fairly good method that’s leaps and bounds better than FPTP and then if that works, trying to use the momentum to get somewhere better than that, seems better than fracturing the effort all over the place while most of the US is still using the world’s worst system in the present.
It would be good to have a place to discuss the merits of different systems. If you want to make a change, the bulk of your efforts are going to be in breaking out of the FPTP system, and that doesn’t change regardless of which voting system you support.
That’s a good point. I’ll make a post making it clear that any content related to systems other than FPTP that is getting some traction would be welcome, too. Getting rid of FPTP is the main goal, not RCV for the sake of RCV in opposition to any other system.
Can you describe those? Most people have only heard of ranked choice as an alternative.
Put simply you just give every candidate points out of 10 and then elect the one with the highest average.
Approval voting (not acceptance, my mistake), simplifies things a bit by only allowing none or all points. Which is the best if you want to vote tactically anyway.
This method sidesteps a couple of the issues that Arrow’s impossibility theorem raises, and is easy enough to understand. Ranked choice is better than first past the post but still has the issue that adding an additional candidate can affect the end result in complex ways.
With approval voting most aspects are easy to understand. Adding or removing candidates trivially has no effect on the rest of the result. And while you can still vote tactically the only real tactic is where you put your cutoff, you should still vote for the option(s) you like best.
I like approval the best. Simplest to understand. Works better than ranked in my opinion, and you don’t have to vote for the “lesser of all evils”