Unfortunately, RCV rarely produces better political outcomes because it's not like good politicians actually ever run.
The first big hurdle of any politician's career is to get noticed. And attention whoring rarely gives you good politics.
Not saying I agree, but an excerpt from the strangers, Seattle's progressive mag, endorsement guide for your reference.
We know, we know. Voting ‘No’ on the first question aligns us with a bunch of odious conservatives who drop tens of thousands of dollars on local elections every year in an attempt to hoard their treasure. We know those same oligarchs dropped a bunch of money to back the ‘No’ campaign on this very measure, too. But they’re voting ‘No’ because they don’t want to learn new tricks. We’re voting ‘No’ because we want the best form of ranked-choice voting, and we want to make sure it sticks.
The short version of our argument goes like this: We love ranked-choice voting, and we vastly prefer it to approval voting, and so we really really really want you to choose Proposition 1B on the second question. That would send a clear message to state and local politicians that you want RCV.
But choosing this particular version of RCV in this particular way could create more hurdles to implementation than need be. We think taking a more plugs nose orderly approach to changing our electoral system could bring the best of all possible RCVs to Seattle with fewer headaches, and we think we could still do it on a timeline that more or less tracks with the 2027 deadline that this measure would impose. If that’s enough reasoning for you, then vote ‘No,’ and then vote ‘Proposition 1B,’ and then move on with your beautiful life.
What specifically do they object to with approval voting? I remember reading a very lib write up where this guy ran several computer simulations (for what that is worth). Approval seemed to have some of the lowest strategic voting and spoiler vote effects, while being one of the simplest changes (vote for everyone you like as opposed to just one, which leads to so called "strategic voting". For any given person there almost always exists an obscure 3rd party that better represents their politics than a milquetoast republican or democrat.
Voting method nerds focus a bunch on various statistics and game theory things and so on, searching for a way to weigh fairness.
Personally I don't care if it's fair, I just want it to favor socialists, especially at a local level.
Approval voting has a bias towards moderation that's fairly intuitive, which is that the least-unwanted candidate will tend to win. So if a bunch of libs get together and approve of a centrist up to a succdems that's still pretty right wing, but balk at the socialist candidate, they can bank on centrist candidates also getting support from some farther right people. And someone who might vote for the socialist in FPTP might fill in the succdems or centrist bubbles as well, because hey they're a lib and they may legitimately approve of them, but not prefer them.
There are a lot of variations on how ranked choice is tabulated, but the basic ones like irv or multi-seat irv-ish ones have a middle exclusion effect that I personally favor for our chances. Least-preferred candidates get eliminated, so the centrists will likely end up being middle-least-preferred, say in the top 3 but then eliminated, making it a fight between farther left/right candidates.
Obviously elections and choices and politics are more complex than this, but it's handy to think of approval as a pro-centrism mechanism and ranked choice as (usually) one where socialists have a bigger shot.
Every one of those analyses without exception makes the same assumption: Politics is about individuals with Opinions, and that voting is about choosing the politician whose Opinions have the lowest root mean square Opinion Distance from all the individuals.
This is the whole basis of the Condorcet criterion, and by this metric, approval voting does very well.
But if you think any of that has any relationship whatsoever with political economy you need to kill the liberal in your head.
This is a :vote: thread on the hexbear dot net. I think "Not that this has anything to do with political economy in the real world" is automatically implied.
People really do be resistant to change even when it's uncomplicated and good.
