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RoboJackets / constitution

The constitution for RoboJackets
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Ranked choice voting for elections #5

Open jcarn opened 6 years ago

jcarn commented 6 years ago

With multiple qualified people on the ballet it is easy to have a ranked preference, but the current system of only one vote and the plurality wins "forces" people to vote strategically. If ranked preference voting / instant runoff voting is too much work to implement, then even simple runoff voting would help eliminate this problem.

jcarn commented 6 years ago

A quick illustrative example of why this is good: Three candidates: A, B, C. I prefer them in order: A is my 1st choice, B is my 2nd choice, C is my 3rd choice.

There general popularity is: C is most popular, B is second most, and A is least popular.

Since I believe A has little chance of winning I should cast my vote for B, since it is preferable to me that B win instead of C win. This is bad, since I am not voting for the person I believe most qualified for the position. The practical outcome is also bad; if a number of people held the same preferences as me but we all under-estimated A's popularity, our decision to support a candidate less preferable but more likely to win would harm A's chances of winning despite our support for A.

Ranked Choice allows us to vote for our preferred candidate without sacrificing the efficacy of our vote. Simple runoff voting offers a slightly less precise benefit as ranked choice in cases of more than 3 candidates, but is much simpler to implement.

tangemicioglu commented 3 years ago

This item was rediscussed in the Core meeting of March 31st 2021.

The conclusion at the time is that there aren't any good reasons to add ranked choice voting, considering that we rarely have 3 or more candidates for a position and discussions during elections already accounts for some of the balancing that occurs due to ranked choice.

In contrast, ranked choice increases the complexity of the elections process. It puts us in a position where we have to make a choice between longer elections or digital voting. Digital voting can introduce additional difficulties during elections, requires us to make systems to support it and can be unreliable.

This issue will be kept up in case ranked choice becomes more relevant in the future and is reconsidered.