“Can you explain briefly what’s ranked voting? Yeah, so instead of having to vote for just one candidate on the ballot, you get to rank order your preferences. Like this person first, this person second, this person third, and so on. And then the counting, the way the counting works is essentially we look at which candidate refused, which candidate received the fewest first place votes. That candidate is eliminated, and the ballots are redistributed so that the second choice on that ballot counts. And you basically keep doing that until you have a candidate that has 50 percent of the vote. So instead of a situation where a candidate wins with maybe 30 or 40 percent of the total vote, even though they had the most votes, now you have a much more of a consensus candidate. We have much more of a consensus, and also I mean one big advantage that I see in that, that is for example with the French system that I’m more familiar with, that it eliminates what we call the vote utility, like useful vote. So for example, you are really into a candidate, but that would be just five percent of the vote. Then there are someone who’s doing, who has a chance to be elected, an actual chance to be elected as president. And for example, people don’t like Macron, but don’t like even less Repen or V and they like a very more leftist candidate, just for instance. And with that, they can put their favorite candidate first, and then second, they can put Macron more. And then the Repen, if they like less, V, they. And in America we call that the spoiler effect, or the spoiler vote, that you’re voting for the lesser of two evils, you have to choose that, or you vote for the third party candidate, which can spoil the results essentially. And there are examples where this made a difference. So in the 2000 presidential election in America, between George W Bush and Al Gore, of course that election came down to Florida, and 537 votes out of millions cast in Florida changed the result or dictated the result of George W Bush winning the state and therefore the presidency. But there were thousands of people who voted for Ralph Nader, a green party candidate, a third party candidate who had no chance of winning in the electoral college. If just some of those voters had selected Al Gore instead, Gore would have won Florida in the presidency. Now if we had had a system of ranked choice voting, it’s probably likely that the Nader voters would have put Ralph Nader one and Al Gore two, because Gore was a much more palatable choice for those voters than George W Bush. So I do think that something like ranked choice voting would have actually changed at least that election, potentially others. You know the election between Trump and Hillary Clinton came down to just a handful of states and not a lot of votes in those states. Same with Trump versus Biden in 2020. Yeah, in the longer term, so it would not only help for that specific election, but since the wish that you have is to have people more committed, I also believe that if people can see that their vote is better reflected in the reason, maybe there will be much more into believing in the democracy. I think that’s right. And again, the cities that have adopted it in the U.S., we do see better voter engagement. So I think that’s right.
” #democracy #voting #learning
