Wouldn’t it be great if you didn’t have to vote for the least horrible candidate? If you could vote for who you wanted without feeling like you’re throwing your vote away?
If we had ranked choice voting, we’d have better legislators in office to start with. And if they used it in the speaker votes this could be resolved already.
This is assuming those voting would rank their choices, they won’t.
They would be required to if the rules were changed.
You don’t have to have a ranking if you vote for one person once. You can’t “force” a person to vote.
Yes they can. They can 100% change the voting procedure to require a vote or an abstention. In a ranked choice vote, they can be required to rank all potential options.
Even changing rules to make speaker whomever gets most votes first would reduce this to single election.
The problem is that Republicans vote this way out of protest and to force their choice on majority.
If there was RCV they would simply do all this privately and hold vote once they got to agreement or were giving up.
That doesn’t make sense. They don’t even have consensus right now within their party to vote in a FPTP system. You think they’d be able to coalesce around multiple people, in the same order?
The whole point of RCV is that internally it is equivalent of running multiple runoff elections, each time eliminating the lowest performer.
Republicans right now can run as many speaker elections as they want.
If they had a goal to conclude it then Gym Jordan would get more votes in every run.
You’re right, because voting for speaker is more charged/personal, I could see it not working. See my other comment here, the idea isn’t that a democrat or independent would win, just that you’d have a less bonkers candidate or at least wouldn’t be deadlocked.