Ranked choice voting: yes or no?

[BootmanLA]

15 hours ago, PozBearWI said:

I follow how ranking candidates can be informative of public opinion.  The risk of course is that public opinion changes moment to moment.  "Now" has always been a moving target.  

If we have a pool of five individuals and we rank them by whatever metric we're using at the moment; they will line up in a chosen order.  But once we eliminate one of them and consider four, those metrics are most of the time going to change somewhat as well.  

Thus, once we start to narrow down the choices; evaluation becomes more a "now what" thing.  Difficult to do if one's "stand out" person is clamoring for attention.  

And yet we do that all the time, in everyday life. "I want to get burgers for lunch today, but if most of y'all don't want that, my second choice is Chinese. What I really don't want is Indian." And so on. We rank our favorite flavor from a group. We rank our favorite songs from a list.

It requires a bit of thought, yes. But that shouldn't be a deal-killer, especially if it results in the candidate who's most acceptable to the most people winning.

[PozBearWI]

I agree @BootmanLA.  But also those choices are apt to line up differently tomorrow than today.

[BootmanLA]

On 10/30/2024 at 7:38 AM, PozBearWI said:

I agree @BootmanLA.  But also those choices are apt to line up differently tomorrow than today.

But we may regret an ordinary vote tomorrow even if we cast it today. We may regret skipping a race thinking none of the candidates are good enough, only to realize that the winner was the worst of the bunch. And so on.

There will always be post-election regrets. I'm sure a metric shit-ton of people in PA, MI, and WI regretted not voting in 2016 thinking Trump couldn't win. But we don't design systems to account for regret. If anything, having ranked voting means we can hedge our bets against a really bad turnout, which would increase, not decrease, my satisfaction with my vote.

[nanana]

Well said BootmanLA

[PozBearWI]

@BootmanLA  I think we are essentially saying the same thing.  Ranked voting, however temporary those decisions might be; would give us an order of favored candidates.  While we sort of get that in our existing system, the operative words are "sort of".