>A ranked choice ballot at least requires you to assign a unique value to every candidate on the ballot: you can honestly rank your second choice without being concerned that doing so undermines your first.
That's highly implementation dependent. Where I live we have ranked-choice ballots for local primary elections, while the local general elections are FPTP. State and Federal elections are all FPTP for primary and general elections.
While I am free to rank up to five candidates when filling out my ballot, I am not required to use all five choices.
I can just ignore all that if I choose and just rank one candidate first and leave the rest of the ballot blank. Or I can rank multiple candidates, but I'm not required to "assign a unique value to every candidate on the ballot."
In fact, if there are more than five candidates for a particular office, I can only rank five of them.
All that said, I'm absolutely in favor of RCV and wish we had it for all elections, not just local primary elections.
It sounds like the local ranked-choice implementation is unnecessarily complex and constrained. A simple "rank all candidates from 1 (most preferred) to n (least preferred)" for n candidates seems like the better solution.
>It sounds like the local ranked-choice implementation is unnecessarily complex and constrained. A simple "rank all candidates from 1 (most preferred) to n (least preferred)" for n candidates seems like the better solution.
I'm sure you're right. Unfortunately, I'm not the person you'd need to convince.
Here's contact information[0] for the relevant folks, and thanks for taking an interest. I'm sure my fellow townspeople will be grateful for your guidance. You have my thanks for stepping up to help us improve our voting systems!
For your reference, here's some background on the how the process came to be[1][2][3][4]
That's highly implementation dependent. Where I live we have ranked-choice ballots for local primary elections, while the local general elections are FPTP. State and Federal elections are all FPTP for primary and general elections.
While I am free to rank up to five candidates when filling out my ballot, I am not required to use all five choices.
I can just ignore all that if I choose and just rank one candidate first and leave the rest of the ballot blank. Or I can rank multiple candidates, but I'm not required to "assign a unique value to every candidate on the ballot."
In fact, if there are more than five candidates for a particular office, I can only rank five of them.
All that said, I'm absolutely in favor of RCV and wish we had it for all elections, not just local primary elections.