First, forgive me for assuming that by “RCV”, this community means IRV. I’m aware that ranked choice voting can refer to any one of a number of different voting systems that involve ranking candidates, but to my knowledge IRV is by far the most popular, and it seems to be the one discussed in the sidebar of this community.
The sidebar’s “Why Ranked Choice Voting?” provides a number of reasons that IRV is superior to FPTP, and one reason that it is better than multi-round systems like France uses. But it does nothing to advocate for IRV in particular, rather than proportional systems like MMP, Party List Proportional, or STV.
I live in Australia, where we use IRV for our House of Representatives. And while this is still enormously better than the FPTP used in America and the UK, personally I view IRV as the worst possible acceptable voting system (while FPTP is simply unacceptable and anti-democratic). Looking at our parliament, Labor holds 51.3% of seats, from 32.6% of first-preference votes. The LNP holds 38.7% from 35.7%, and the Greens hold just 2.7% of seats despite achieving 12.3% of people’s first preference votes. And that’s a record high performance for the Greens in terms of seats, despite a relatively minor improvement in vote (previously they held 0.7% of seats from 10.4% of votes). That’s over 80% of the seats controlled by just 2 parties. IRV is not nearly as effective at defanging the major parties as one would hope, and it does tend towards the middle.
Our Senate uses the much better system of STV, and so its result is much more reflective of the wishes of the voters, but with its own problems (the tiny state of Tasmania gets as much representation as NSW despite being 1/15th the population).
Advocating for change is hard, of course, and I would support anyone trying to get any more democratic option in their country. But if you’re going to advocate for change, wouldn’t it be better to advocate for really good change, instead of mediocre change? In the UK, one of the problems when they had a referendum on IRV (what they call “the alternative vote”) was people who wanted proportional systems not supporting it because they were afraid that mediocre change now would make it harder to get really good change later.
So are people here because they wholeheartedly believe IRV is the best system? If so, why? Or is it a pre-compromised position thinking it might be more politically palatable despite knowing it’s less good at representing voters’ wishes?
I chose “RCV” as the wording only because that’s the most commonly used term for the most commonly used alternative voting system that’s gaining the most traction inside the US.
I don’t have a strong opinion about which one of the systems that isn’t FPTP is the best. Mainly I think it would be better to build momentum behind switching to something that is better than what we’re doing now.
Yeah that’s fair. I just know that there are some people who really like other voting systems like STAR which also use ranked choices, so I thought I’d clarify where I was coming from. In Aus most people refer to it as “preferential voting”, which is also ambiguous, but is fine enough for casual conversations where everyone’s already on the same page.