I'm not sure I see the problem your concerned about.
My concern is that ranked-choice voting for a single state in a national election may make matters worse for that state.
Hypothetically let’s suppose that Biden and Trump are really close. Each has 267 electoral college votes. It all comes down to Maine.
Steve is a voter in Maine. Steve is not happy with the duopoly and he reads about ranked-choice voting.
“Well I’m not crazy about Biden and I absolutely hate Trump. Might as well try something different and vote 3rd party. If my 3rd party vote for president doesn’t win then my choice goes to Biden anyway so it doesn’t hurt to try something different” he thinks to himself.
Well what if there are a lot of Steves in Maine. The Green Party candidate actually wins! The Steves in Maine celebrate that Maine goes Green Party in the presidential election and all is great. Or is it?
What happens to Maine’s electoral college votes?
They go to the proper candidate - the candidate that a majority of Maine's voters preferred. This is a feature, not a bug.
Democrat: 267
Republican: 267
Green: 4
If this was a NATIONAL ranked-choice voting system and with no majority of electoral college votes, then the lowest choice would be redistributed to their second option. Maine’s choice of Green Party would get redistributed to Democrat and Biden wins.
Democrat: 271
Republican: 267
Green: eliminated
But that’s NOT what we have. We don’t have NATIONAL ranked-choice voting. It’s just Maine.
So what would actually happen, I think, is that Maine’s votes would not get redistributed. They picked green so they stay green.
Democrat: 267
Republican: 267
Green: 4
Now there’s no candidate with the 270 electoral college votes needed. To select a winner, they invoke the 12th amendment which puts the result of the election in the hands of the House of Representatives, which will vary in results depending on who currently controls that branch.
So what happened to the Steves out there in Maine? They prefer Biden over Trump but chose to vote 3rd party. By doing so, they ended up hurting Biden’s chances of winning. They potentially sabotaged the less terrible candidate by going 3rd party. Maybe they should have just stuck with the duopoly.
Doesn’t that defeat the entire purpose of ranked-choice voting??? I’m not sure how helpful it is if just one state is doing it, but admittedly I’m still unsure of the logistics on this.
It sounds like you're just re-introducing the lesser-of-two-evils argument, albeit at the state electoral level. If you start with the premise the lo2e is valid, you're not gonna like ranked choice voting. From my perspective, lo2e is idiotic. It's voting for a bad candidate on purpose.
Maybe you're just saying that, idiotic or not, a lot of people still buy into it, and will attempt to "game" ranked choice voting as well. If a state manages to pass something like ranked choice voting, I'm guessing the voters are ready for the change. But even if some do game it, are we any worse off than before? And unless everyone games it, we're better off.
The real irony of ranked choice voting is that it allows voters to actually vote "against" a candidate. Lo2e tries to convince people that they can vote "against" a candidate, but you really can't. All you can do is vote "for" another candidate. Nowhere in your vote will it indicate who you were supposedly against. But ranked choice allows a voter to specifically and deliberately rank a candidate last (or not rank them at all - the math is the same). So, if you think Trump is the worst, you can rank him last - yes, below Kanye West. This actually means something - and you don't have to guess which of the other candidates is "most likely" to win.
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