this post was submitted on 21 Dec 2023
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Showerthoughts
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That sort of ranked choice voting would be great in areas where there is truly a democratic option. In Utah, there is no other party except Republicans. They have gerrymandered every district so that only republicans can have their votes counted, and it is not possible to register as anything other than republican in Utah. That's one reason we're so in the pockets of big oil and gas industries here - it's all about how much money politicians can line their pocket with. But the point is - there is no way to downvote anyone. Most of us don't even get a chance to vote here.
A slight misconception in your comment, what OP is describing is much closer to a slightly limited version of Score. Or possibly an expanded Approval.
It's nothing like Ranked Choice.
To break things down, Ranked Choice is an Ordinal voting system. You rank candidates A then B then C.
The actual mechanics of the election are a series of First Past the Post elections all on a single ballot.
To contrast, Approval and Score are both Cardinal voting systems. You express preference for A, but that doesn't mean anything about your preference for B. The votes per candidate are counted independently of the votes for any other candidate. This means that Cardinal voting systems are 100% immune to the spoiler effect. They're also almost completely immune to clone candidates and other such attacks.
Ordinal systems will always fall victim to the spoiler effect, although the more complex ordinal voting systems like Ranked Choice mitigate it somewhat (while making things so much worse when it does crop up)
Sounds good thanks for clarifying.