I was recently talking to a friend about what the USA could do to improve our system of voting for elected officials, and we got on the subject of ranked choice voting. I realized my friend didn't know anything about the subject, and neither did many people, so I'll explain it a bit here for you.
Let's say there's a Presidential election with 4 people on the ballot. Candidates Adams, Bart, Combs and Davers.
I go to the voting booth and rank the candidates like this:
- Adams
- Bart
- Combs
- Davers
After the voting is done, the votes are tallied up, and 1st place votes are counted. Let's say Adams got 10%, Bart got 30%, Combs got 40% and Davers got 20%. No candidate has broken 50%, so Adams would now be eliminated for receiving the smallest % of 1st place votes.
Now they look at the #2 votes of only people who voted for Adams (like me) and everyone who voted for Bart, Combs or Davers #1 still stays voting for those people #1. My #2 was for Bart, so now my vote is for him. The new numbers are Bart 40%, Combs 40% and Davers 20%, so once again no one has broken 50%. Now Davers is eliminated for being the lowest %, and either Bart or Combs will win based on the remaining votes. Since my top 2 have been eliminated, my vote is now for my #3, Combs.
The reason this system would work better, is that people rarely vote for 3rd parties in the US, because they feel that's a vote "taken away" from their preferred candidate. In ranked choice voting, this isn't an issue. The opposing candidate gains nothing by you putting a 3rd party candidate #1, since the opposing candidate needs to break 50% to win anyways. If he was already going to break 50%, it didn't matter which way you voted.
Let me know if you have any questions!
