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?
There’s a large amount of people who have had FPTP long enough that they immediately think any system more complex than “guy with most votes wins” is inherently rigged somehow. I also hate to say it, but one of the most important voting blocs is people who are old enough that they are not necessarily cognitively all there. I was an election judge (I’m not sure if that’s a common term everywhere, but it’s what we call the people at the polling location who hand out ballots and bring them to be counted), and so many people would come in with fliers they got in the mail that tell them who to vote for. The fliers were literally designed to look like ballots including the little circles filled in. They’d hand me the flier saying it was their vote, and I’d have to correct them that it was an advertisement, and that they had to fill out a ballot for themselves. They frequently had trouble doing that.
The existing political parties (in America, at least) also have no reason to advocate for anything else because it would erode their power. The center-right Democratic party knows they would be pushed left, which they (and their funders) don’t want, and the far-right republican party would be pushed towards the center, which they (and their funders) don’t want.
I just looked up STV, and I’m not sure my quick wikipedia read gave me a complete understanding (or how it works in Australia specifically), but it seems like you must have multiple senators per district? In America, representatives and senators are both exclusive to their district. Without a pretty fundamental change to how that works, something like STV couldn’t be implemented. We do have multiple positions to fill sometimes in local elections like town councils or certain types of judges. In those circumstances, there might be a list of 8 candidates, and it will say “pick up to 3” or something like that.
I think the reason that IRV is popular to promote in America is that it’s still a large improvement, and it’s not too difficult to explain.
Oh wow, that’s a very fancy title. I’ve done that role too, but it’s just called “Polling Assistant” here.
We get those fliers too. They’re called “how to vote” cards and there are some regulations regarding them (e.g. they can’t look like official Electoral Commission material), and I think most people probably do follow their preferred party’s HTV—especially those voting for our two largest parties (voters for smaller parties are more likely to be democratically savvy enough to think about what they want for themselves). I can’t say I’ve ever had someone try to use the HTV as their ballot though.
Our Senate is actually modelled after yours, unlike Canada’s which takes after the UK’s House of Lords. However, using STV in your Senate would not be feasible, unless you were to grow the size of the Senate significantly. We have 12 Senators per state, with 6 elected every 3 years, which is why it works for us. Realistically you probably don’t want to be using STV unless you’re electing at least 4 at a time, ideally 5, and definitely no less than 3.
Doing STV in the House of Representatives would not be so difficult, though. You just merge what was previously 3–8 separate electorates into one larger electorate, and have it return a number of Representatives equal to the number of electorates it replaced. For logistical reasons you may not want to merge across state lines, so the 6 states with 1 Rep would in effect be using IRV, and the 7 states with 2 Reps would be in the weirdest-case scenario where you basically lock it in to electing 1 Democrat, 1 Republican, at least in the short term (unless/until other parties can get a foothold, or the state is so overwhelmingly leaning one way that that party can get two Reps, which would require 67% support). But it would work wonders in the larger states like California and Texas or even down to Kentucky and Louisiana. In Kentucky, for example, instead of the current 1D 5R, under STV (assuming people’s voting intentions did not change, which would probably be true in the short term), it would be 2D 4R, based on 65.1% R to 33.6% D. And of course the fact that your Democrat vote still matters even in the strongest Republican areas, you might see better turnout leading to a more accurate result.
It is a little more difficult to explain the underlying logic, that much is true. But truthfully, voters don’t really need to know that. They only need to know what their job is. And it’s as simple as IRV: just number candidates in your preferred order. In Australian Senate elections we even simplify the process by letting you vote for one party’s ticket all at once in what we call “above the line” voting. So instead of voting [1] first Greens candidate [2] second Greens candidate [3] first Labor candidate [4] 2nd Labor candidate [5] 1st LNP candidate [6] 2nd LNP candidate, I can just vote [1] Greens [2] Labor [3] LNP (with the option to vote below the line if, for example, I prefer the 2nd Greens candidate over their 1st).
The really big advantage to it, though, is in the longer run. IRV is great because of how it allows small parties the chance to gain a foothold, but makes it very hard for them to gain any significant amount of power, since that voting support has to be highly concentrated in one specific area. Proportional systems like STV actually mean minor parties like the Greens in our Senate actually hold significant power. Their 14.5% of Senate seats next to the Labor Government’s 32.9% and the LNP Opposition’s 40.8% means that unless Labor and the LNP agree on something, Labor has to get Greens support to pass legislation (in addition to the support of at least 2 of the even smaller minor party and independent Senators). It means a much higher percentage of voters are seeing their wishes reflected in the Acts passed by Parliament. And our system is flawed because of the non-proportional Reps being the politically more important chamber (it’s where the Prime Minister almost always comes from, by convention), which colours how people think about politics and makes Labor and LNP support even in the Senate higher than it might be in a fully proportional system (this is purely speculation on my part, but I think looking at other countries like Germany and New Zealand, my speculation is likely warranted).