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You are here: Home / DC Authors / Why Ranked Choice Voting is the Best Choice

Why Ranked Choice Voting is the Best Choice

June 7, 2025 by Michael Ossipoff Leave a Comment

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Ranked Choice Voting (RCV) is the best choice for free and fair elections and would be more revolutionary than a switch to Approval Voting. RCV has been in use for over a century, because it can be easily handcounted and it doesn’t require any more vote counting than Approval.

A Mutual-Majority (MM) is the majority-size group that all prefer some same set of candidates to all others. That’s their MM-preferred set.

The Mutual-Majority Criterion (MMC) is as follows:

The winner must always come from the MM-preferred set if the members of that MM vote sincerely.

A voter votes sincerely if s/he doesn’t vote an unfelt preference or fail to vote a felt preference that the the rules would allow them to vote for in addition to those that s/he voted.

RCV meets MMC. Few other methods do.

In the United States and most other countries, progressives are the MM. They can’t lose in RCV if they vote sincerely. According to Public Citizen, a big majority prefer the Greens’ progressive policies to those of the Democrats. That MM can’t lose in RCV and RCV has no spoiler problem for the MM.

Additionally, RCV meets Later-No-Harm Criterion. Later-No-Harm (LNHa):

Modifying your ballot so as to vote B over C should never change the winner from A to B, if you prefer A to B, & vote sincerely.

A certain particular ballot votes B over C if & only if the following is true:

If we throw out all of the ballots except for that one, & we remove from the count all candidates other than B & C, then B wins.

Additionally RCV has no chicken-dilemma, another problem for many voting systems.

None of these things can be said for Approval. Mutual-Majority Criterion, Later-No-Harm Criterion and the chicken-dilemma are all problems with voting systems that can be avoided with RCV.

RCV is the only alternative voting system that has been sweeping the country, enacted in many municipalities including state and national elections. Two states currently utilize RCV.

In summary, RCV meets MMC & LNHa, and has no Chicken-Dilemma. Approval and even STAR voting methods both fail MMC, LNHa, and both have Chicken-Dilemma.

Support it.

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Filed Under: DC Authors Tagged With: Election Methods

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About Michael Ossipoff

Michael Ossipoff writes for Democracy Chronicles from Miami, Florida and is one of our earliest and most prolific authors and creators. His writing covers the world of election method reform verifiable election counts and the importance of independent and third party candidates.

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