So a few cities (e.g. San Francisco) and even states (e.g. Maine) have moved towards ranked choice voting. The idea is that during an election rather than just selecting who you like best, you rank order as many of the candidates as you want. You can still just choose 1 or you can rank all of them.
So how are votes tallied? For the first round, everyone's first vote is tallied. If someone gets more than 50% of the first votes, they win and the election ends. If no one gets 50% of the vote, the candidate who came in last is dropped from the race and anyone who had that candidate at the top of their list will now have their #2 vote counted. If no one still has 50% of the vote, the process continues in this iterative fashion until someone gets 50% of the vote.
A common justification for this is that it will help smaller parties and incentivize people to vote for who they really want to win rather than just one of the main two party candidates. A common criticism is that people are too dumb to understand how to do it.
For simplification purposes, Let's assume there is a D an R and an Independent running. Maybe a bunch of people on the center of the D and R parties really like the Ind candidate. Under the traditional way of voting, lots of those centrists will not vote for the Ind cause they think they will be throwing their vote away and they will end up getting the candidate they like least. But under this new process, a democrat leaning centrist could put the Ind first and the D second. Doing this is no way helps the R win because the R needs 50% of the vote and regardless of how the centrist D votes, the vote goes against the R candidate.
So far it seems to just being used on local and state elections....I'm sure it could potentially run into legal issues if someone tried to use it on federal elections, but who knows?
So what do you think about this method of voting in theory? Yea? Nay?