Comments by "SmallSpoonBrigade" (@SmallSpoonBrigade) on "" video.

@ellenorbjornsdottir1166 Not really. It's a bit of a numbers game to have the appearance that a candidate received more than 50% of the vote. But, in practice, that's not what's going on. You don't have to select 3 candidates, but if you only select one or two, it means you might wind up in a situation where at the end of the process your preference didn't count at all. The problem here is a lack of candidates representing the will of the voters and corruption. This doesn't address that in any way, shape or means. In this case, it appears to have helped a Democrat, but I'm still not sold on such an undemocratic voting system being used. It helped the dems this time, but it could just as easily hurt them. How many of those "votes" that were used to win the election would have gone to him had they finished with the first ballot? Answer, not enough to win.
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It's not a better system if you don't have better candidates. The 50% number is largely arbitrary when you have to go to 2nd and 3rd ballots in order to determine a winner. You still have a candidate that didn't win a plurality of the votes being elected as was the case in thissituation. The real problem with American politics is that whomever is elected, they don't represent the voters in most cases. Changing to RCV doesn't address that in any way.
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Ranked choice voting is a bit of sleight of hand to make it look like a candidate is getting more than 50% of the vote, when really, they're still getting less than that. It's trivial to come up with a scenario where the least popular candidate wins by being slightly less unpopular than other candidates where under the current system they'd be in 3rd place. It literally makes no sense when it doesn't address the real problem. The real problem being a lack of competent, qualified candidates running in the first place. All this does is make it harder to push for a real solution to the problem.
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