When I looked at the 2026 us municipal elections pages on ballotpedia I was shocked by how many council seats and offices such as license collectors are uncontested. It seems like 99 percent of the elected positions involve either uncompetitive primaries or one party general elections. How are these elections considered elections if voters don't have the ability to choose?
Duverger's law states that winner-take-all elections using FPTP tend to lead to the formation of a two-party system. This is very clearly visible in the USA, but much less so in other countries using the same system, like Canada or United Kingdom, where smaller parties may not have any grand victories, but they consistently manage to win at least some seats.
Why is it? Why third parties in the US can't do what parties in other countries with similar systems do all the time? And do you think it's possible this situation would persist even if United States changed its electoral system, because the voters would just keep voting for the two main parties anyway?
Let's begin with the first sentence:
> Condorcet voting methods (also known as “head-to-head” or “round robin” voting) use a ranked choice ballot that enables voters to rank candidates in order of preference just like with ranked choice voting (RCV), ...
Let's call it "Instant-Runoff Voting" like they did in 2014 when they changed their marketing term to the umbrella term "Ranked-Choice Voting". Condorcet RCV is RCV. This latest thing from Better Choices (Top-3 head-to-head) is not RCV but it is Condorcet.
But if a ranked ballot is used instead of a FPTP ballot or an Approval ballot or a Score ballot (which STAR uses), then it's Ranked-Choice Voting. Whatever the tallying rules are (i.e. IRV vs. any variant of Condorcet vs. Borda vs. Bucklin).
> ... but have a different tabulation rule that downgrades the importance of a voter’s first choice.
In either case, the voter intent by ranking A>B is that if this voter has to choose between A and B, this voter is voting for A. IRV doesn't always elect the candidate with the most first-choice votes. IRV doesn't necessarily count a voter's first choice vote. What IRV does is apply majority rule to only the two candidates in the final round (not to any other pairing of candidates).
What IRV does is downgrade the importance of Majority Rule and, in an unpredictable manner, sometimes ignores Majority Rule:
>>> When more voters mark their ballots that Candidate A is preferred to Candidate B than the number of voters marking their ballots to the contrary, then Candidate B is not elected.
This majority rule is directly coupled to the equality of our votes. If Candidate B is elected (as has occurred with IRV) then the voters preferring Candidate A over B had the value of their votes diminished w.r.t. the voters preferring B over A, because there were more of those A voters than the B voters, yet the fewer B voters get to have their candidate elected.
> It’s possible for there to be no Condorcet winner due to a “Condorcet cycle.”
It's possible for a Condorcet cycle in any RCV election even when IRV is used to tally the vote. Whether there is a cycle or not depends only on how voters voted and is independent of the tallying method. Two RCV elections that we know about (Minneapolis Ward 2, 2021 and Berkeley school board District 4, 2022) had cycles. It's just that Condorcet tallying will realize that fact while IRV is oblivious to it.
Arrow's theorem ultimately rules, no matter what method is used. Whether it's IRV or Condorcet or STAR or Approval or FPTP, it is possible that voters can vote in such a manner that it is impossible to satisfy majority rule (w.r.t. voters actual preference) and impossible to avoid a spoiled election. It's just that Condorcet will satisfy majority rule and prevent a spoiled election whenever it's possible. IRV fails that sometimes and spoils the election even when it's possible to avoid a spoiled election.
> Condorcet voting could elect a candidate that is no voter’s first choice. > > Condorcet voting could produce an unexpected outcome: the election of a candidate that no voter (or very few voters) ranked as their first preference.
That is a falsehood when considering 3 candidates (anything could be possible when there are 4 or more). Even with the extreme case of 3 candidates, 2N+1 voters: N voters for Leftie, N voters for Rightie, and 1 voter for Candidate Milquetoast (at least Milquetoast votes for themself), that requires a dead tie between Leftie and Rightie, and complete polarization (where no Leftie voter likes Rightie at all and ranks Milquetoast above Rightie and vise-versa), and only then can you say that Condorcet will elect a candidate that gets almost no first-choice votes (but the Milquetoast candidate gotta lotta second-choice votes from both the Left and Right).
> For voters who are used to a status quo in which your first choice is the only thing that matters, the election of a candidate who lacks substantial first-choice support could be unsettling.
But that's also what happens with IRV. And FairVote is proud of that. They like to call it a "come-from-behind victory" when the candidate that IRV elected lacked the most first-choice support. Because when IRV does that, it is ignoring the first-choice support in favor of majority rule. But when IRV also fails majority rule (besides ignoring the most first-choice support), that's when IRV fails in the minds of the voters. It fails because it didn't value the voters' votes equally and failed to prevent a spoiled election, which is precisely what RCV is promising to do.
> Moreover, an elected leader who fails to have the strong backing of any voting group could very well face challenges in governing.
Which is precisely what has happened with IRV failed to elect the Consistent Majority Candidate (the Condorcet winner) when such candidate did exist. That is 100% the case (with, admittedly, just two cases).
> For a real-world example, consider the 2022 special election for U.S. House of Representatives in Alaska. The last place candidate in round 1, Nick Begich, was in fact the Condorcet winner.
Nick Begich was in third place (regarding only first-choice votes). Not "last place", who was Al Gross (who got 12.6% of the primary vote and bowed out). Begich and Palin (both GOP) together had 59.8% of the first-choice vote and Begich was only 2.8% behind Palin, in only first-choice votes (among GOP), but had far more support than Palin overall.
But the failure of IRV was that Palin was the weaker of the two GOP candidates and could not beat Peltola head-to-head in the IRV final round. But Begich could have and would have beaten Peltola with a 4.6% margin. But IRV didn't give Begich that chance to, which was its failure.
Again, the moral of the Alaska 2022 story is:
>> Mary Peltola in August 2022, unfortunately shares a distinction with George W. Bush in 2000 and with Donald Trump in 2016. All three candidates were elected to office when the public record indicates that more voters marked their ballots preferring a different specific candidate for that office. >> >> In August 2022, more Alaskans, 87899 to 79461 (an 8438 voter margin), preferred Begich to Peltola and marked their ballots saying so. But Mary Peltola was sent to Washington to represent the Alaskan people in Congress. >> >> In November 2024, again, more Alaskan voters marked their ballots that Begich is preferred to Peltola by nearly the same margin, 7876 (164861 to 156985). But this time Begich is sent to Washington. >> >> Both times about 8000 more Alaskans said they would prefer Begich to Peltola. And, both times, marked their ballots saying so. Both times Instant-Runoff Voting was used. >> >> >> What was different? >> >> Sarah Palin was in the race in 2022 and not in the race in 2024. And the outcomes were different winners.
That is the lesson to learn from Alaska 2022. And FairVote is lying to themselves (and to you) about it.
> A Condorcet voting method would have elected the last-place candidate, an unpalatable and counter-intuitive outcome for many voters.
No, the Condorcet voting method would have elected the candidate that was clearly preferred by voters over every other individual candidate. And by enough of a margin (4.6%) to be significant. FairVote is lying to you.
> RCV [IRV] has been proven to elect the Condorcet winner in almost every instance.
That's true. And that's the only reason why IRV has been "successful". IRV is only successful (elects the consistent majority candidate and prevents the spoiler effect) when it elects the Condorcet winner. IRV never succeeds when it fails to elect the Condorcet winner. Remember, all the CW need do in an IRV race is to get into the IRV final round and then the CW will always win that final round.
> Of the nearly 500 single-winner [IRV] elections in the United States since 2004 in which we have sufficient ballot data to identify the Condorcet winner (as of September 2022), the Condorcet winner won all but twice, for a Condorcet efficiency rate of 99.6%.
No. It was four times that IRV failed to elect the Condorcet winner and FairVote knows that. The "Condorcet efficiency rate" is 99.2%. Two of those four elections had no Condorcet winner (the Minneapolis and Berkeley cases mentioned above).
> In other words, [IRV] already reliably elects the Condorcet winner in the vast majority of cases, ...
Good!! So let's elect the Condorcet winner in every case where it is possible to.
> ... using a simpler and more intuitive system.
That's bullshit. IRV cannot make this simple claim:
That's far simpler than IRV.
> And, in the rare situations where [IRV] does not elect the Condorcet candidate, that candidate – as noted above – will by definition be a candidate who lacks substantial first-choice support from any voting group.
And that is also a lie. Begich did not "by definition ... lack[] substantial first-choice support from" GOP voters. Begich had substantial first-choice support, almost as much as Palin, whom IRV did send to the final round. But IRV sent the weaker of those two GOP candidates to the final round to lock horns with Peltola. And that weaker GOP candidate lost to Peltola, where the stronger GOP candidate, Begich, would have beaten Peltola as he did two years later (when Palin wasn't there spoiling the race).
FairVote is extremely self-serving and dishonest in their service to self. FairVote's interest is in their own self-preservation, not in election reform. They are just unwilling to face the facts and admit to failure when they are staring at such in the face.
"Mixed-member proportional representation (MMP) is the type of mixed electoral system that is associated with Germany and New Zealand. Its defining feature is called seat linkage compensation, which in theory offers ‘the best of both worlds’. Mixed proportional systems aim to provide both proportionality and still keep representatives elected locally in single-member districts (SMDs). This is in contrast to mixed majoritarian systems, where the aggregate outcomes of the SMD seats (which may be highly disproportional) are not compensated for. It is, however, far from a perfect system, even if it may be a normatively desirable amalgamation of PR and localized winner-take-all methods. In fact, the most common version of MMP is highly vulnerable to strategic abuse of the compensatory subsystem, which has led to MMP (and similar systems) failing in more countries than where they succeeded.
In this article, I will not only show how MMP has failed in different countries, but also offer some explanation on why it didn’t fail in others, as well as consider some proposed solutions to make such systems less vulnerable. I also present my own solution to make MMP more robust while not sacrificing its main features, which I have been circulating in election reform circles for a while now."
>The findings of the experiment were stark. I found that RCV produced significantly lower levels of voter confidence, voter satisfaction, and ease of use. It also increased the perception that the voting process was slanted against the respondent’s party.....
>One of the main claims made by reformers about RCV is that it will make campaigns more civil, as campaigns will have an incentive to seek the second-place vote of supporters of different candidates. To study this claim, I first conducted a difference-in-differences analysis on independent expenditures for and against candidates. In this analysis, I found that negative spending increased significantly in Maine following the implementation of ranked-choice voting, casting doubt on the claim that RCV makes campaigns more civil.....
>On a positive note for RCV reformers, I found that voting for non-major party candidates — which reformers tout as “sincere voting” instead of voting for a candidate simply due to their realistic chance of winning — was increased by 5 points among the respondents who were given the RCV ballot instead of the traditional ballot.....
https://app.betterchoicesohio.org/vote/63Bbif
I'm experimenting with Better Choices for Democracy's Top 3 Head-to-Head polling app, and on a lark I decided to make it about Condorcet methods: Top 3 Head-to-Head itself, Top 4/5 Ranked Pairs, and a catch-all option for other Condorcet methods like Schulze, Tideman's Alternative, Condorcet-IRV hybrids, and any others I may be missing. If you choose other, please explain in the comments, because I really want to learn about the advantages and disadvantages of each. Poll closes at 12:00 AM Saturday.
I'm new here, so if he's part of a list of figures that have already been covered, I'm sorry. But what do you all think of him and his advocacy? (In the U.S. context; his institutional homes are New America, Fix Our House and Johns Hopkins, and he hosts a podcast called Politics in Question.) He used to be a strong supporter of ranked-choice voting, but qualified it in favor of advocacy of multi-member districts, open-list proportional representation, and fusion voting.
https://www.reddit.com/r/thirdpartyroundtable/s/ylpEp5FLrW
Was reading this article, and thinking about all the little ways The Two Parties here in the States try to interrupt the progress of other parties. There are several fairly obvious methods, but often little things like suing over names, or obscure technicalities, or whatnot are used to limit ballot access all together. This might not be the greatest example out there, but it's still an example.
I thought it was pertinent to discussions here because it doesn't really matter what other election reforms we might succeed in if we don't also ensure diverse ballot access. So what practical concerns do you have regarding ballot access, and are there any potential solutions you've come upon?