Ranked Choice Voting

 

Smoke Gets In Your Eyes

Now laughing friends deride
Tears I cannot hide,
So I smile and say, when a lovely flame dies
Smoke gets in your eyes.

Should we bring back the smoke-filled rooms at political conventions?

I would suggest that selecting candidates through primaries, rather than through conventions, has changed the dynamic from a ranked order method to a plurality method.  Candidates used to be selected based on a majority of the convention.  After many ballots and smoke-filled rooms, supporters of candidates that did not have a chance of winning changed their support to candidates that they preferred.

Primaries replaced those smoke-filled rooms.  Rarely do political conventions go to even a second ballot.  However primaries also select candidates that receive a plurality of the vote rather than a majority of the support.  By doing so, candidates that might be the last choice of the second-place finisher, are selected.  The process may be more transparent, but it has replaced a ranked order system, as imperfect as it was, with one where the plurality wins.  Eventually, according to Duverger’s Law, there are only two parties and voters may choose the least offensive candidate, rather than the best candidate.

There are  polls for the best college football or basketball team, which is basically a ranked order system (e.g. how many first-place votes, etc.) which is then used to select the teams for the Football Championship playoffs and is considered in seeding the teams for the NCAA March Madness playoffs.  Why do we select sports teams using ranked order, but select candidates for election by  primaries?  Kind of makes you wish for those smoke-filled rooms again.