Voters in Montana on Tuesday delivered a major blow to big moneyed interests by overwhelmingly passing a ballot initiative barring corporate cash from political campaigns in the state.
With 87% of votes counted as of Wednesday morning, Montana Constitutional Initiative 194 has ++received++ support from more than 65% of voters, with just 35% registering opposition.
Ranked Choice is a slight improvement over our current system, but it was first invented in 1785 and has some inherent flaws. Flaws that can be exploited by bad actors to subvert elections.
May I suggest STAR. It was designed in 2014, and makes it much harder to subvert an election.
I disagree on the improvement being slight. Having incentive to campaign cooperatively because second choices count could dramatically change political culture. And Australia has used ranked choice for a century, without becoming any hotbed of subversion.
Further, RCV has a foothold in the US Alaska (pending surviving the latest repeal initiative on yesterday’s state ballots), Maine, and many cities. It’s much more realistic to spread it than to start from scratch with something else.
Portland OR! Just did my rcv ballot the other day
I say very slight because of the many, many, glaring flaws of the system.
The fact that it does not eliminate the spoiler effect is a major one.
All it does is kick the spoiler effect down the road a bit. It eliminates the also ran candidates. As soon as a third party candidate actually becomes halfway viable, the spoiler effect kicks in harder than ever and skews the election the other way.
And FairVote (the assholes who keep pushing a broken system) know this.
The simplest argument against RCV is thus, the current US primary system followed by a General election functions nearly identically to a version of RCV capped at two rounds.
You can’t just call those “glaring flaws” when it has a proven track record in the real world.